The Central Bank said Thursday that it withdrew the license of Kuban Commercial Bank, which was implicated in a scheme to steal 1.25 billion rubles ($43.5 million) from the Pension Fund.
The order to withdraw the license was signed Wednesday after the Central Bank’s supervisory officials were required to cut short a seminar in Anapa to return to Moscow, bankers and an acquaintance of one of the Central Bank officials told Vedomosti.
On Friday evening, Kuban, which has own capital of 42 million rubles ($1.5 million), received a transfer, based on fraudulent documents, from the Pension Fund’s accounts at the Central Bank. The 1.25 billion rubles were designated for “renovating infrastructure of the Pension Fund.”
The Central Bank later recovered all the money.
Kuban’s license, however, was pulled because of substantial inaccuracies in its financial statements and the organization’s inability to satisfy its creditors’ demands over financial liabilities, the Central Bank said in a statement. Because of liquidity problems, Kuban was not servicing its clients’ requests in a timely manner. The statement also said the company had given regulators significantly incorrect information, which masked the company’s actual financial situation.
The bank has been put into administration.
It is possible that some officials at the Central Bank broke the rules on accepting and handling documents, Chairman Sergei Ignatyev said Wednesday, citing the results of a preliminary investigation.
“If a bank accepts questionable money, it can be held responsible for not notifying the Federal Financial Monitoring Service. There’s passive guilt when a bank overlooked something or intentionally didn’t notice a questionable transaction,” said State Duma Deputy Pavel Medvedev, who is a member of the National Banking Board.
In such cases, the Central Bank conducts a check and usually makes a decision within two to three days, he said.
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