The Moscow Tverskoy District Court arrested the former chairman of the board of the now-bankrupt Neklis Bank, Sergey Boriskin, and his deputy Natalia Akulova. reports Kommersant.
According to investigators, from September 2018 to January 2020 the defendants Boriskin and Akulova moved clients’ funds out of the bank by issuing unsecured loans to individuals under their control. The total damage was estimated at 1.3 billion rubles. The bank owed depositors 1.9 billion rubles.
Searches were also carried out on the alleged accomplices of the former Neklis Bank executives among the loan recipients, but none of them were detained.
In January 2020 the Central Bank of Russia revoked Neklis Bank’s licence due to the complete loss of its own funds following the withdrawal of assets. In March the Moscow Arbitration Court declared the financial institution bankrupt.
Sixty-four per cent of the bank’s shares belong to the Cypriot offshore Organat Financial Limited, which is owned by Natalia Kasperskaya, the CEO of InfoWatch; the remainder is owned by LLC “Lawrence-Star” and private individuals.
Kasparskaya told the media that she became the bank’s owner not by her own choice, and that it is a “huge headache” for her.
Earlier, the owner of the British company Mayzus Financial Services (MFS), Sergey Mayzus, suggested that Neklis Bank was part of a scheme to launder customers’ funds of the cryptocurrency exchange WEX, the successor to BTC-e.
Sergey Mayzus: the money of the WEX cryptocurrency exchange may have been laundered through Natalia Kasperskaya’s Neklis Bank
According to him, the late Timofey Musatov, the lawyer for the alleged founder of BTC-e Alexander Vinnik, allegedly helped close Neklis Bank’s cash gap. He also claims that Musatov in 2018 offered the then-chief executive of WEX Dmitry Vasilyev “lifetime legal support for WEX” for $2.5 million to the bank’s coffers.
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