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A senior manager at a branch in the Lipetsk region was placed under arrest by a Moscow court Friday on suspicion of laundering more than $100 million and funneling it out of the country, court officials said.
Kirill Tormyshov, deputy head of the branch, was formally arrested along with two other suspects by the Ostankinsky District Court, Moscow City Court spokeswoman Anna Usachyova told Interfax.
She identified the other suspects only by their last names: Dvurechensky and Ovchinnikov.
The complex fraud scheme revealed by the Interior Ministry last week purportedly involved more than 50 front companies that forged contracts to receive more than 3 billion rubles ($100 million) from various banks. They then funneled the money to banks in Cyprus and Bulgaria, investigators said.
It is one of the country's largest purported scams investigated by authorities in recent years.
Investigators have not identified the banks allegedly victimized in the case. Sberbank maintains that there were no wrongdoings in the Lipetsk branch's operations.
The Interior Ministry's economic crimes department said Friday that a total of four suspects had been arrested in the case and that a fifth had been released from custody on condition that he not leave Moscow. All of the suspects are residents of either Moscow or Lipetsk, officials said.
The suspects have been charged with illegal banking activity, punishable by up to seven years in prison. Neither Sberbank nor any other banks were involved in the money laundering, Interior Ministry officials said.
Tormyshov, 42, had previously worked for Alfa Bank as head of the corporate clients department, Kommersant reported Friday.
Police in Chelyabinsk, meanwhile, have detained a local Sberbank cashier suspected of stealing more than 12 million rubles ($400,000) from the bank.
The cashier, Irina Shvetsova, turned herself in to police and has admitted to stealing the money, regional police spokesman Alexei Popov said, Interfax reported Friday.
Shvetsova claimed that she stole the money over the course of five years and had already spent all of it, Popov told Interfax.
