Swiss bankers accused of lax control of accounts belonging to Russian cellist with ties to Putin

Four former bankers with the now-shuttered Swiss affiliate of a significant Russian financial institution have gone on trial over allegations that they did not correctly examine accounts opened within the title of a Russian cellist with longtime ties to President Vladimir Putin.

The one-day trial in Zurich district court docket Wednesday stems from details about secretive monetary flows revealed within the Panama Papers leaks in 2016 that implicated musician and Putin’s childhood good friend Sergei Roldugin. It took years for prosecutors to unravel the online of cash and produce the case to court docket.

The trial opens a uncommon window into allegations from the Panama Papers {that a} member of Putin’s circle of mates helped funnel tens of millions overseas and that monetary workers might have turned a blind eye to such inflows. Putin has denied the accusations.

Both earlier than and since Putin ordered forces into Ukraine, Western nations have imposed sanctions towards oligarchs and others with shut ties to his authorities, together with Roldugin. The U.S. Treasury Department describes Roldugin as “part of a system that manages President Putin’s offshore wealth.”

The former Gazprombank workers — three Russian-born and one Swiss-born who can’t be named below Swiss regulation — are charged with failing to adequately examine whether or not Roldugin, who was a shopper of the financial institution from 2014 to 2016, really owned the belongings within the accounts.

Documents filed when the accounts had been opened listed anticipated transactions of 11.5 million Swiss francs (US$12.2 million). The indictment would not point out how a lot of that will have arrived on the financial institution.

It is “publicly known that Russian President Putin officially has an income of just over 100,000 Swiss francs and is not wealthy, but in fact has enormous assets managed by people close to him,” in accordance with the indictment.

The doc says Gazprombank maintained the accounts regardless of “abundant” media studies about Roldugin’s relationship to Putin, together with that he was godfather to considered one of Putin’s daughters.

The financial institution’s paperwork listed Roldugin’s earnings as 1 million Swiss francs a yr, his belongings at 10 million francs and his occupation as a musician, indicating that the cash flows had been “in no way plausible as Roldugin’s own wealth” and that the best way the accounts had been structured indicated he was getting used as “a straw man,” the indictment reveals.

It cited a New York Times article revealed in 2014 that quotes Roldugin as saying he didn’t have tens of millions. He was registered as helpful proprietor on the accounts of two corporations, one primarily based in Panama and one in Cyprus.

In 2016, when studies named Roldugin because the proprietor of US$2 billion in offshore belongings, Putin denied having any hyperlinks to offshore accounts and described the Panama Papers leaks as a part of Western efforts to weaken Russia.

Putin famous that regardless that his title did not determine in any of the paperwork leaked from a Panamanian regulation agency, Western media pushed the claims of his involvement in offshore companies.

Putin mentioned Roldugin had performed nothing incorrect and emphasised that he was pleased with the musician who spent his private cash to advance cultural initiatives in Russia.

The Kremlin made no remark Wednesday on the trial of the 4 former bankers.

The public prosecutor’s workplace is asking for the defendants to obtain a seven-month suspended jail sentence.

For years, Switzerland has sought to wash up its status as a secret haven of billions in ill-gotten or laundered cash, together with by means of laws that requires bankers to scrutinize the origin of funds related to “politically exposed persons.”

In one high-profile case, Swiss prosecutors helped crack down on billions linked to former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, in what was referred to as the 1MDB scandal.

The Swiss affiliate of Gazprombank introduced in October that it was ceasing operations after consultations with Swiss monetary market regulator FINMA.

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Associated Press writers David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany, and Vladimir Isachenkov in Moscow contributed to this report.