Raids Are Common, Say Russian Bankers

Unannounced raids by unidentified gunmen are becoming a regular part of doing business for Moscow banks, and a panel of bank officers Tuesday called for President Boris Yeltsin to protect them from hostile forces.


The call to defend Russia's fledgling financial institutions came in response to last Friday's attack on MOST-Bank by a group of masked men armed with automatic weapons. The men, who initially refused to identify themselves, turned out to be a detachment of President Boris Yeltsin's security staff.


The event, however, appears not to be isolated. Two other bank officials told a packed press conference stories about how they, too, had been harassed by unidentified gunmen.


"If this had only happened with MOST-Bank ... but we can tell you stories about similar incidents of varying degrees that happened to Pervy Professionalny Bank and Bank Rossiisky Credit," said Sergei Yegorov, president of the Association of Russian Banks. "This is a sequence of events which is becoming a general tendency."


The president of Pervy Professionalny, Henry Zingerman, said that last Friday at 2 P.M., just three hours before the MOST-Bank raid, a group of men dressed in camouflage and carrying automatic weapons broke into his bank, terrorized his clients and then stormed into his office demanding documents from his safe. Zingerman was then detained in a district police office for three hours without a warrant. His dacha was searched and a cache of powerful weapons was discovered.


"I called the prosecutors' office and asked them what kind of criminal investigation they had against me and they said they didn't. That's a fact," he said.


An official from Rossiisky Credit said his office was invaded recently by a group of armed men that also demanded documents. Shortly after they arrived, the men were called off and no harm was done.


Though it is now clear who surrounded the MOST-Bank building on Novy Arbat on Friday evening, brutally beating several bank guards and sending two to the hospital, it is still not clear why.


MOST-Bank officials say a group of armed men trailed president Vladimir Gusinsky to work from his country home and sparked a confrontation. Yeltsin's staff said the president's motorcade was interrupted by a gang of armed men in a motorcade of their own and that the group was ultimately followed to MOST-Bank.


The Moscow intrigue machine cranked out a few of its own explanations. "Somebody wants to settle their account with MOST-Bank," editor-in-chief Dmitry Ostalsky wrote in a front-page column in the newspaper Segodnya, which is supported by MOST-Bank.


In an interview Tuesday, Ostalsky said someone wanted to send a signal to Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov, who has often been associated with MOST-Bank. "If I knew who, I would have written it," Ostalsky said.


Nezavisimaya Gazeta maintained that Gusinsky was being punished for allegedly plotting to place a favored candidate in the post of defense minister in preparation for a run at the presidency in 1996.


Earlier Tuesday, Yegorov met with presidential advisers and said he will soon meet with the president on this and other banking matters. "If the entrepreneur is the most important part of the market economy, the state is obligated to protect us," Yegorov said.


The bank association concluded by sending an open letter to Yeltsin "as a guarantor of the constitution and law and order." Last year, they sent a letter to the president protesting the killing of 13 of their colleagues over the course of the year.


"Is the president ready to defend the democracy he constantly supports, or isn't he?" asked Vladimir Vinogradov, president of Inkombank.