FIMACO

On August 23, 1990, a secret memorandum from Vladimir A. Ivashko, who was Gorbachev's deputy general secretary, outlined strategies to hide the Communist Party's assets through Russian and international joint ventures because Boris Yeltsin, who was the new president of the Russian Republic in the Soviet Union, wanted to levy taxes on the Communist Party's vast administrative property holdings and on the Party itself.[1] The memorandum was to organize the transfer of CPSU funds, CPSU financing and support of its operations through associations, ventures, foundations, etc. which are to act as invisible economics.[2][lower-alpha 1] In November 1990, the offshore structure Fimaco was formed by the Russian Central Bank, then known as Gosbank, to hide these funds.[4][5] In November 1990, Leonid Veselovsky, a colonel in the First Chief Directorate of the KGB and an expert in international economics, was transferred from his KGB post in Portugal to Moscow to be under deputy chairman of the KGB of the USSR Philip Bobkov; however, two weeks before the August Putsch in 1991, Veselovsky quit the KGB and began working for the Switzerland office of Boris Birshtein's Seabeco; but, in the meantime, hundreds of banks, joint stock companies, and joint ventures had been created under the direction of the CPSU Central Committee.[1][6][7][lower-alpha 2][lower-alpha 3]

On 13 August 1991, Valērijs Kargins and Viktor Krasovitsky (Latvian: Viktors Krasovickis) in Riga, Latvia, opened as the first foreign currency exchange as a closed joint stock company in the Soviet Union.[16][17][18] They had opened a currency exchange at their Riga train station tourism office, previously on 3 April 1991. He along with Viktor Krasovitsky and Krasovitsky's wife Nina Kontratyeva later founded Parex Bank in January 1992.[19][20] Riga was intended to become the global financial center in the former Soviet Union and Parex promoted itself as "We are closer than Switzerland!" (Russian: «Мы ближе, чем Швейцария!»)[2][21][22][23]

In a 1991 report, former KGB colonel Veselovsky, whose responsibility was to manage Communist Party commercial affairs overseas, told that he had found ways to funnel party money abroad. In addition to Nikolai Kruchina and Viktor Geraschenko, Russian prosecutors also considered Veselovsky to be a principal figure in the money transfers.[1][24][25][26] The stated goal was to ensure the financial well-being of party leaders after they lost power.[27][28] Large amounts of state assets were transferred through FIMACO. One estimate is about US$50 billion.[29] Alexander Litvinenko stated that millions from the IMF loan went to Russian mafia.[30] On April 4, 1992, Yeltsin issued the “The fight against corruption in the public service” decree to provide for maximum transparency of officials and their institutions by providing a listing of their financial obligations, liabilities, securities, income, bank deposits, real estate holdings and their personal property and to prohibit officials from owning businesses.[31] The people with access to FIMACO included senior officers of the Communist Party, Komsomol, state banks, KGB, and the military.[32] A 1993 document signed by a senior deputy to Viktor Gerashchenko, the head of the Central Bank of Russia, forbid disclosure of transfers to FIMACO: "The balance of the investment account of the [Central Bank] in FIMACO shouldn't be disclosed on the balance sheet of the bank."[27][28]

Felipe Turover Chudínov, a senior intelligence officer with the foreign-intelligence directorate of the KGB, alleged that $15 billion of IMF funds had been funneled through Switzerland, Lichtenstein and Caribbean countries as black cash or obschak to support Kremlin friendly operations and companies.[33][34][35][36][37][38][39] Turover maintained that since the Russian state bank responsible for foreign operations, VEB, had severe economic hardship during the collapse of the Soviet Union and that Russia had taken on all Soviet republics' foreign debts of the Soviet Union which caused Russia to claim it was bankrupt in 1991, VEB's accounts were frozen on January 1, 1992, because Russia had no more money to spend.[40] Turover said that this prevented the typical Cold War cash flows through VEB to pro Kremlin operations and companies and caused, instead, schemes to be established.[41][lower-alpha 4] In 1992, Turover stated that he was mandated to negotiate with Russia's creditors.[37]

From July 1996 to March 1997, Vladimir Putin was head of Russia's presidential property management department and was responsible for both the former Soviet Union's property and the Communist Party's property worth hundreds of billion-dollars after a Yeltsin decree that became effective on 11 December 1996.[42][43][44][45] Turover stated that Putin created schemes involving Joint Ventures, LLCs, and JSCs as front companies in order to claim large stakes in the transfer of state property to other persons and entities: for example, in East Germany, he fraudulently leased the huge cultural center of Russia in Berlin to a company for almost nothing but the company then leased the building for a very large amount.[43][45] Turover alleged that Putin pocketed the money that the company received from the expensive lease.[43][45] Because of this very large loss of assets, Russia needed over $300 billion in foreign investments and demanded even more IMF money during 1998 and 1999 in order to not declare bankruptcy in the spring of 1999.[46][47][48] However, IMF officials did not approved additional IMF money for Russia.

In 1998, Edmond Safra was a key FBI witness to a $4.8 billion money laundering scheme involving IMF money, his Republic National Bank of New York, his Republic National Bank of New York (Suisse) in Geneva, Mikhail Kasyanov and Vladimir Putin.[49] He also provided evidence to the Geneva prosecutor Bertrand Bertossa.[49][50] According to la Repubblica, an account in Safra's Bank of New York received $21.4 billion between 27 July 1998 and 24 August 1998.[51] Turover stated that the scheme would not have occurred without the Russian Finance Minister Mikhail Kasyanov's approval.[52][53]

FIMACO's existence was disclosed by Russia's chief prosecutor Yuri Skuratov in February 1999 when Skuratov stated about $50 billion was transferred from the Central Bank to FIMACO and then out of Russia including IMF funds between 1993 and 1998 and that he had given to Carla del Ponte, the Prosecutor General of Switzerland, a list of about twenty names which had received a total of $40 billion of the IMF money in accounts at Swiss banks.[54][55][lower-alpha 5] Soon afterwards, FSB chief Vladimir Putin attacked Skuratov with a campaign which included a video where Skuratov allegedly has sex with two prostitutes.[27][28] The video which was released to the public in February 1999 led to Skuratov's dismissal on 2 April 1999.[55][lower-alpha 6]

Russian officials claimed that FIMACO was 100% owned by the state-owned Banque Commerciale pour l’Europe du Nord, but never provided any proof according to a Newsweek article in March 1999.[27][28]

According to Sergei Tretyakov, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov sent US$50 billion worth of funds of the Communist Party to an unknown location in the lead up to the collapse of the USSR.[60][61][lower-alpha 7]

Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Yukos Oil conglomerate received some of the money and he gave Viktor Geraschenko chairmanship of Yukos for the help Khodorkovsky received from Geraschenko.[63]

Reports by Swiss and German intelligence implicated numerous persons in the Russian mafia through Grigory Luchansky's Vienna, Austria based Nordex and Boris Birshtein's Zurich Switzerland based Seabeco AG, KGB, FSB, and others in the scheme to move billions away from the Soviet Union and into a secret economy.[64][65][66][lower-alpha 8] Some of the funds were sent to the United States through Michael Cherney and Semyan Kislan.[68] Russian prosecutors had previously tried to implicate Birshtein, Veselovsky, Luchansky, and others of illegally money laundering Communist Party funds.[1][63]

In a 2004 interview of Russia's IMF director Alexey Mozhin (Russian: Алексей Можин) by Andrei Denisov of Vremya Novostei about the IMF money transferred on 22, 23, 24 and 24 July 1998 and 14 August 1998 and the subsequent locations of the money, Mozhin cites the Central Bank of Russia's PricewaterhouseCoopers audit.[69] The stolen IMF funds caused the Russian financial crisis of 1998 which began on 17 August 1998.[69][70]

• Corruption in Russia

• Bohlen, Celestine (July 30, 1999). Secrecy by Kremlin Financial Czars Raises Eyebrows. New York Times. Retrieved December 8, 2020. Archived from the original on June 16, 2019.
• Coulloudon, Virginie (July 3, 2003). Putin's Russia: A confusing notion of corruption. Princeton.edu. Archived from the original on October 15, 2015.