Rosfinmonitoring proved about $350 million laundered through Promsvyazbank - Chikhanchin
MOSCOW. March 11 (Interfax) - About $350 million was laundered through Promsvyazbank , head of the Federal Service for Financial Monitoring (Rosfinmonitoring) Yury Chikhanchin said at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"We worked pretty well with the Investigative Committee. I'll mention two cases. One concerns Promsvyazbank. We worked with 27 countries when looking for assets. We managed to find these assets and seize them, and we're even returning some of them. About 7 billion was seized. And as for laundering, the most important thing we were able to prove is that it was about $350 million - this was legalization; they not only stole it, but legalized it, too," Chikhanchin said.
Discussing the state defense order, he said that the number of organizations Rosfinmonitoring had put "on its watch list" had grown. "And the number of contracts we have is growing significantly. Here, too, we were able to decrease the number of fake organizations participating in activity tied to the state defense order. [...] Vladimir Vladimirovich, we're working, this work is taking place, and I think that today we're shifting to Promsvyazbank, we're leaving other banks - we're working very closely with this bank, meeting with Pyotr Fradkov [the head of Promsvyazbank] regularly. This will gradually give us the chance to return - approximately, roughly 33% of all defense orders already went there. I don't want to make a mistake, but I think the number is about 9,000 clients have already become clients of Promsvyazbank from the total number," he said.
Some of the clients that went over to Promsvyazbank are "high-risk clients," Chikhanchin said. "And high-risk in two areas: the first is the contracts that they fulfill under the state defense order, there are risks there. And the second is this non-contractual risk - that is, the activity that we discussed in May. We're sitting here now, figuring it out with every client, trying to understand what paths there are for getting these enterprises healthy," he said.