Project "Cassandra"

Data on suspicious transactions of the largest international banks, which became known due to the leakage of information from the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, were published

The international investigative project of journalists "Cassandra" published the results of the study of classified documents of the US financial intelligence (FinCEN). The list of financial transactions that attracted the attention of FinCEN included those in which, according to the department, Russians appear, RBC reports . Among them are entrepreneurs Oleg Deripaska, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, former head of Boris Yeltsin's administration and presidential adviser Valentin Yumashev, and cellist and friend of Vladimir Putin Sergei Roldugin. Part of the documents relating to Russia was published by the Important Stories portal , which cooperates with an international group of investigators.

The investigation is based on the leak of over 2,100 suspicious activity reports filed by global banks with FinCEN. The files ended up on BuzzFeed News, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Some of them were collected by the US Congress as part of an investigation into alleged Russian interference in the elections. The reports cover the period from 1999 to 2017.

According to journalists who have studied the documents, in October 2010, Sandalwood Continental, a company associated with Roldugin, received $830,000 from Cyprus-based Dulston Ventures. The basis of the payment indicated that this was a fee for renewing the loan agreement. According to the investigative consortium, Dulston Ventures is on the list of affiliates of several Russian companies that are part of Aleksey Mordashov's Severgroup.

Presidential adviser Valentin Yumashev received $6 million from Epion Holdings Limited in the British Virgin Islands. This company, according to investigators, belongs to billionaire Alisher Usmanov.

The Rotenberg brothers, according to the BBC , despite the sanctions, carried out international settlements through the London-based Barclays bank. So, for example, Arkady Rotenberg managed to transfer $ 7.5 million when buying Rene Magritte's painting La Poitrine. This was previously noted in the US Senate, the representative of the businessman then said that the deal was legal.

According to FinCEN, the American holding company Bank of New York Mellon transferred from 1997 to 2016 transactions worth more than $1.3 billion "related to Oleg Deripaska." Through Deutsche Bank, the investigators allege, between 2003 and 2017, even more transactions were made in the interests of Deripaska - in the amount of $ 11 billion.

"Important Stories" reports that they found suspicious transfers in the FinCEN report to the account of the wife of the former deputy head of the "voentorg" Leonid Teif Tatyana. The couple were arrested in the United States in 2019 on charges of embezzling $150 million in Russia. Journalists discovered a transfer of about $400,000 to Tatyana Teif from Hong Kong-based Ringo Trading Limited, which, according to investigators, is connected, according to investigators, with the leader of one of the largest cash-out platforms, convicted banker Sergei Magin.

The database contains information on 3,810 potentially suspicious transactions involving Russian banks. In these transactions, they received $7.28 billion and sent $3.50 billion. The most active foreign counterparty of Russian banks was the Bank of New York Mellon (2992 transactions).

The list of Russian banks that carried out these transactions includes Sberbank, VTB, Rosbank, Alfa-Bank, Evrofinance Mosnarbank, Vnesheconombank, Nomos Bank, Vozrozhdenie, Gazprombank, Unicredit, Promsvyazbank, Novikombank, Raiffeisenbank and others.