Swiss national radio and television channel RTS today revealed links between the banking sector and a Russian oligarch and a politician close to Vladimir Putin, thanks to the leak of data from an asset manager.
Although in principle neither of the two Russians is on the list of those sanctioned by Switzerland or the European Union for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is believed that one of them (Alexander Ponomarenko) has involved his companies in the war, while the second, former minister Leonid Reiman, is suspected of money laundering
The revelations came following the theft of confidential documents from asset management company Finaport in Zurich, temporarily published in non-indexed locations on the Internet (“deep internet” or “deep web”) and to which RTS had access.
Swiss television, with the help of European media outlets such as Le Monde, Der Spiegel or ZDF, reviewed 400,000 documents and concluded that Finaport controlled Ponomarenko’s $46 million in various Swiss bank accounts and tens of millions more of Reiman’s.
Ponomarenko controls the state-owned Mosvodokanal, the largest water company in Russia, with important ties to the Moscow City Council and apparently directly involved in the invasion of Ukraine.
The company is suspected of sending money and precision equipment to Russian soldiers in Ukraine and even some fighters in the country said in videos on social media that they worked for the Moscow company.
Regarding Reiman, Russian Minister of Telecommunications between 1999 and 2008 and later personal advisor to Dmitry Medvedev during part of his presidency of Russia (2008-2012), he was already accused by Swiss courts in 2006 of involvement in the embezzlement of large-scale funds and other money laundering practices.
RTS emphasized that because the information comes from documents stolen by ‘hackers’, it has only selected data that it considers of public interest, while Finaport told the television channel that this constitutes “a random, unupdated and incomplete selection”.
He admitted that he had been the target of data theft, called for caution against the spread of “false information” and assured that only eight of his more than 800 customers currently live in Russia.
The Swiss Ministry of Economic Affairs has provisionally frozen around 7.5 billion francs belonging to Russian individuals and companies sanctioned by the Swiss government, sanctions similar to those imposed by the European Union on Russia since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.
Source: DN
