Russia: Banking on Influence

 Russian President Vladimir Putin insists that while the Panama Papers stories published by Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and its partner Novaya Gazeta are correct, they show no corruption or illegal activity on his part. Putin has called the stories a Western plot to destabilize his regime.But additional analysis of the records by OCCRP and Novaya Gazeta show that offshore companies connected to Sergey Roldugin, one of Putin’s oldest friends, profited obscenely in building the jewel of the financial empire of Putin’s inner circle: Bank Rossiya. And not only that, Bank Rossiya itself has profited massively at the expense of Russian taxpayers. 

Bank Rossiya featured prominently in earlier OCCRP stories that showed Roldugin used offshores to conduct a series of highly suspicious transactions, many of which made no financial sense but left Roldugin much wealthier.Documents showed that Roldugin and his associates owned a number of offshore companies registered in the notorious tax havens of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and Panama. Billions of dollars flowed through the companies, which received “donations” from Russia’s richest businessmen and controlled the activities of strategic Russian enterprises. Bank Rossiya employees figured prominently in many of the transactions. 

 The bank is described by the US Treasury Department as “the personal bank for senior officials of the Russian Federation” whose “shareholders include members of Putin’s inner circle associated with the Ozero Dacha Cooperative, a housing community in which they live[d]”.New records found by OCCRP show that in 2010, a company linked to Roldugin bought shares of Bank Rossiya for US$ 6.50 per share and sold them just days later to an unknown investor for 32 times more than he paid for them. Within a month, Gazprom, Russia’s largest state-owned company, paid more than 169 times what he had paid for the same shares: US$1,120 per share. Even worse, Gazprom would later sell most of them again for half that price earning large losses.The records detailing these transaction were obtained by OCCRP from public records and the Panama Papers, a set of documents that were leaked from an offshore services provider called Mossack Fonseca to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) with more than 100 media partners across the globe including Novaya Gazeta and OCCRP.Putin, however, was adamant that the Panama files demonstrate no corruption or illegal activity on his part.