Vladimir Antonov
Bandits, wanting to steal a million, rob a bank. To steal a billion, they need to pocket the entire bank. Then the crooks have a chance to get their hands not only on depositors' money but also on government refinancing. And their strong family and friendly connections will spare them unpleasant encounters with law enforcement.
CRIME.in.UA columnist Ivan Pomidorov explains how this is done in practice, using the example of Profin Bank and its affiliate, CityCommerce Bank.
The thief is wearing a hat...
On April 20, it was announced that the National Bank of Ukraine had decided to liquidate Profin Bank, a public joint-stock company. Three months prior to this decision, the NBU had appointed a temporary administration to the financial institution. However, this administration proved powerless—by January 2015, the bank had been completely looted by its owners.
The National Bank's brief press release stated that Profin's collapse was caused by its "risky activities." Looking ahead, I should note that the essence of these "risky activities" was fraud and money laundering.
Profin Bank's management is trying to put a good face on things. Immediately after the NBU revoked the financial institution's license, Profin's supervisory board chairman, Dmitry Fedoseyev, publicly declared the regulator's actions illegal.
Fedoseyev accused the National Bank and the Deposit Guarantee Fund of allegedly supporting the actions of raiders, "who prevented the bank from being sold to an investor."
"The NBU is already actively searching for a scapegoat who will be held accountable for all illegal actions if we win," the banker stated. "The string of dismissals of high-ranking NBU officials indicates an active search for scapegoats to deflect blame from National Bank Governor Valeria Gontareva and her first deputy, Oleksandr Pisaruk, who played the most active role in the dismantling of ProFin Bank."
So, if we follow Fedoseyev's logic, it was National Bank officials who were embezzling and laundering money through entities linked to Profin, not its owners and management. Interesting, isn't it?
Donetsk's habit of stealing
The entire history of this bank is a massive scam. It was initially stolen, and to cover its tracks, it repeatedly changed nominal owners. Although, of course, the same people were and are at the top of the "food chain."
So, in order.
In 2006, Conversbank was founded in Ukraine. In 2011, 100% of its shares were purchased by Vladimir Antonov, an ambitious and, reportedly, not entirely clean Russian billionaire. According to Antonov, he allocated €50 million (over a billion hryvnia at the current exchange rate) from his personal savings to develop the financial institution's lending business. However, Antonov soon ran into trouble: Lithuanian authorities accused him of deliberately bankrupting his bank, Snoras, and stealing €480 million. Antonov, who was in Kyiv at the time, granted power of attorney to his acquaintance, Reinis Tumovs, a native of Magadan who had long settled in Odessa, to manage Conversbank. He then fled to London, where until recently he was awaiting extradition to Lithuania. Incidentally, London's High Court recently rejected all of Antonov's appeals and ordered his extradition to Lithuanian justice. But that's a whole other story.
Let's return to our "sheep," the bankers. Renis Tumovs, a seasoned con man, simply couldn't resist taking advantage of the opportunity to secure the support of influential Donetsk "buddies" to "squeeze" someone else's property. Among these "buddies," Vadim Stolar, a now-rebranded Party of Regions member, was mentioned...
Conversbank was finally wrested from Antonov in August 2012. According to the Russian, the then-head of the National Bank of Ukraine, Serhiy Arbuzov, also known as a banker for the Yanukovych "family," played a key role in the theft and looting of the financial institution. However, it's unclear whether the recently powerful clan had a vested interest in this scam or whether he simply provided protection for his partners.
Sergey Arbuzov
In any case, soon after seizing control of Converse Bank, its new owners, represented by Renis Tumovs, hastened to change its name. Officially, it became known as the City Commercial Bank. However, the owners and management preferred to call it by the prestigious name CityCommerce Bank—similar to the American City Bank, the core of one of the world's largest banking corporations, Citygroup.
Of course, a good show-off is worth more than money, but the newly-minted (or perhaps more accurately, "freshly stolen") bank didn't even try to live up to its impressive name. This led to some minor annoyances. One of our authors, misled by the similarity of the names, tried to cash checks from New York City Bank at the "Donetsk double." The latter's administrators responded, "These are counterfeit checks—we don't have a branch in New York!" And, in any case, they insisted, "We only serve large corporate clients."
The latter, by the way, is somewhat true: "City Commercial" specialized in clients with multi-million dollar turnovers. But they were very specific clients.
One banking market participant, speaking anonymously, told Forbes magazine: "This bank has always been problematic. A new owner always came along and tried to save it. But it never worked. I think the bank was involved in special services. Its branch network, which collected funds from the public, invested the money in shareholder projects."
Translated from Ukrainian banking parlance, "specific" services mean "conversion." It's worth noting that during Yanukovych's rule, it was impossible to engage in money conversion without connections to the "family." Any attempts by "illegal passengers" were quickly suppressed by the Ministry of Finance under Oleksandr Klymenko.
Soon, this "laundromat" of Tumovs and Co. began to smell unpleasantly, and the founders of the fraudulent scheme began to consider changing their name again. Tumovs's Donetsk friends remembered their small "Bank of Professional Financing" (aka "ProFin Bank"), founded over 20 years earlier. A rather cunning operation was carried out. Through the mediation of Russia's Alfa-Bank, the French Société Générale became the nominal owner of ProFin, which was then transferred to the Cypriot offshore company Zapikeso Limited. Informed sources claim that this company is nominally owned by Ukrainian residents Renis Tumovs and his wife, Tatyana. In short, they all look familiar.
Reinis Tumovs
This complex maneuver allowed Profin Bank to position itself not as a Donetsk bank, but as a European one. All of CityCommerce Bank's more or less liquid assets and most of its branch network were "merged" into it. CityCommerce Bank continued to operate as a "laundromat" for some time, while Profin, having acquired a European veneer, began skimming the cream of the crop from the population, promising exorbitant interest rates on deposits.
There's reason to believe that Renis Tumovs and the puppeteers behind him never intended to engage in normal banking. As with Delta Bank, the bankers' goal was to stuff their coffers and "get out of here." The popular uprising in the winter of 2014 and the ensuing Russian-Ukrainian war triggered an economic crisis. It became clear that it was time to "take over the coffers."
The Big Wash
The heroes of our story began to "drain" all their cash through the "City Commercial" system into shell companies, through which the funds were instantly converted and disappeared into an unknown destination. The website "Finmaidan" detailed how this was done. We will illustrate part of this grand scheme with an infographic published last year on Forbes.ua.
Perhaps a bit late, but (let's be honest) law enforcement agencies took notice of all this fuss and began actively digging, resulting in a significant portion of the stolen money (around 1,5 billion UAH) being frozen.
The investigation uncovered many fascinating details. For example, during a search of one of the defendants in the money laundering case, the seal of the State Tax Inspectorate in the Kyivo-Svyatoshinsky district of the State Fiscal Service of Ukraine's main office in the Kyiv region and the official seal of the statistics department in the Odesa region were seized.
This detail is noteworthy because Renis Tumovs spent a significant portion of his life in Odesa. His wife is from Odesa. His father-in-law, according to the ORD website, is a former prosecutor of the Odesa region. This connection also extends to other defendants in the so-called "grain traders' case" (astronomical sums were converted under the guise of grain transactions), during which investigators uncovered abuses in Tumovs' "offices."
It's worth noting that Tumovs's banks are just the tip of this massive iceberg. Dozens of financial institutions are implicated in the case, including Soyuz and Alliance banks. Well-informed sources claim that they are controlled to varying degrees by the infamous Yuriy Ivanyushchenko (former Party of Regions MP). Ironically, this same figure also figures in the plundering of Nikolay Lagun's Delta Bank—Yenakievsky's companies received millions in deliberately "non-repayable" loans from Delta. At the same time, rumors circulate that Lagun and Tumovs have long been, shall we say, personally acquainted.
Yuri Ivanyushchenko (center)
Another coincidence worth noting is that Yuriy Ivanyushchenko's "right-hand man," Ivan Avramov , is connected to the Odessa region by his "right-hand man" during the Yanukovych era, who controlled the production of counterfeit alcohol, a number of smuggling channels, and, importantly, several currency conversion centers. According to some reports, part of Ivanyushchenko's "military wing" also migrated there—the gang of Armen Sarkisyan (aka Armen Gorlovsky) , which participated in the dispersal of the Donetsk Maidan protests and the murders on Euromaidan last winter. The situation is further complicated by the fact that some of the banks "under investigation" are also suspected of financing "Novorossiya" terrorists. Moreover, the diversion of funds for all these "needs" was clearly protected by high-ranking officials of the current government. So...
…to be continued.
Based on materials from: CRIME.in.UA
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