Africa-Press – Namibia. Graham Stack
LATVIAN prosecutors have charged a shareholder and top managers of the country’s erstwhile third-largest bank, ABLV, with laundering 2,1 billion euros through a network of shell companies.
Also to go on trial is the manager of the notorious shell company provider, investigated by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
The indictment accuses ABLV co-owner and chief executive officer Ernests Bernis, former deputy chief executive officer Vadims Reinfelds, as well as Arvis Sˇteinbergs, co-manager of shell firm provider International Overseas Services (IOS) group, and five others of laundering the proceedings from crime using shell firms incorporated and administered by IOS.money, according to a copy of the indictment obtained by the Latvian TV programme ‘Kas notiek Latvija¯?’.
The indictment follows the OCCRP’s reporting on money laundering via IOS and Latvian banks such as ABLV, starting in 2012, in connection with the ‘The Proxy Platform’ and ‘Troika Laundromat’ projects.
The OCCRP also investigated ABLV in connection with the ‘Pandora Papers’.
Other money-laundering episodes involving ABLV investigated by the OCCRP include ‘Grand Theft Moldova’, and Ukrainian gas fraudster Serhii Kurchenko.
The latter was also mentioned in the indictment, according to ‘Kas notiek Latvija¯?’.
Bernis, Reinfelds, and Sˇteinbergs have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
According to Latvia’s Specialised Prosecutor’s Office for Organised Crime and Other Sectors, starting in 2010, Bernis ran an organised crime group which laundered money using shell firms incorporated and administered by IOS.
The bank’s provision of shell firms in Cyprus, Seychelles, Panama, Belize, British Virgin Islands, and the United Kingdom has allowed customers to transfer money using falsified contracts, this way concealing the ownership and origin of their illicit funds.
ABLV Bank, via IOS, oversaw the administration of the shell firms and their filing of official paperwork.
IOS has provided nominee directors to hide the real beneficiaries of the shell firms.
The bank’s corporate services division played a key role in money laundering, according to the indictment, supervising the accounting and tracking of money being laundered, while overseeing the pipeline of shell firms, according to the indictment.
Prosecutors also charged ABLV’s former anti-money laundering heads with money laundering.
Their role was to ensure that dirty money did not trigger red flags.
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