Russian prosecutors asked Interpol to issue an international arrest warrant for Bank of Moscow’s former chief executive Andrei Borodin.
Borodin and Dmitry Akulinin, a former vice president at the lender, are wanted for fraud in connection with the misappropriation of government funds, the Prosecutor General’s Office said in an e-mailed statement Wednesday.
Ousted Mayor Yury Luzhkov returned to Russia to appear last week as a witness in a case involving City Hall’s purchase of a stake in Bank of Moscow in 2009 for about 15 billion rubles ($478 million). The bank then lent almost 13 billion rubles to property company Premier Estate, funds that ended up in a bank account controlled by Luzhkov’s wife, Yelena Baturina, according to investigators.
Baturina said Sept. 28 that she sold a land plot to Premier Estate for 12.6 billion rubles in May 2009, leading to the legitimate transfer of the funds to her account.
Borodin issued a statement on his web site that said, “Neither my lawyers nor I have been told that an international arrest warrant has been issued against me in Russia. If an international arrest warrant has been issued now … it is not because of the urgency of that investigation. … It is hardly a coincidence that this step should reportedly be taken immediately after my public statement that the takeover of Bank of Moscow was politically motivated and who was involved in achieving that.”
(Bloomberg, MT)
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