Four heads of the Swiss branch of Russian bank Gazprombank will answer questions in court next week about dubious accounts of Russian cellist Serguei Roldouguine, close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The four men, three Russians and one Swiss, are accused of failing to fulfill their verification obligations despite “objective” doubts these accounts should have raised, according to the text of the indictment, which was released by AFP on Thursday. has been consulted.
The trial will open in Zurich on March 8. The Public Prosecution Service has demanded seven months in prison for those involved.
They are accused of opening and managing two accounts for the Russian cellist and conductor between 2014 and 2016, on which they spent several million, namely to receive dividends from an advertising agency for the Russian and Eastern European media, without establishing whether he is the rightful recipient of that money.
However, it was not “plausible” that Roldouguine had such funds “with his income as a cellist and conductor”, the accusatory text stressed, which provided a long list of signals that should have aroused suspicion.
“The case is about 50 million francs”an amount in euros, emphasized the Tribune de Geneve, of the information group Tamedia, which is part of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ, in English).
The so-called Panama Papers, resulting from a study published in 2016 by this consortium, already revealed the existence of these accounts.
Finma, the market control authority in Switzerland, subsequently filed a lawsuit and heavily fined Gazprombank Suisse for failing to carefully investigate its business relationships and transactions with retail customers.
Gazprombank Suisse was the Alpine branch of Gazprombank, the financial arm of the Russian gas conglomerate Gazprom. Banned from the Swiss banking sector since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it announced the end of its activities in Switzerland in October 2022.
According to the Tribune de Geneve, the evolution of the trial is “difficult to predict” because “the prosecution has to prove that Serguei Roldouguine was a stooge” (iron brow) of Putin.
Source: DN
