2020: Arrest in Moscow in the case of embezzlement at Mezhtrustbank
As a source familiar with the situation told Kommersant, the location of 59-year-old Igor Boykov was established by depositors of Mezhtrustbank, to whom the credit institution, which was declared bankrupt in March 2016, owed a total of almost 4 billion rubles. In early March, the former banker unexpectedly showed up at one of his three apartments, at 62 Usacheva Street in the capital’s Khamovniki district. As soon as the bankers’ victims were convinced that it was Mr. Boykov who had arrived, they blocked his apartment and called the police. The police detained the former president of Mezhtrustbank, who had been on the federal and international wanted list for more than two years.
Initially, the defendants in the criminal case on the withdrawal of funds from Mezhtrustbank, which is being investigated by the Investigative Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs under Part 4 of Article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (embezzlement or misappropriation on an especially large scale), were former vice presidents of the bank Igor Tsibulsky and Dmitry Redkin, as well as acting chairperson of the board Svetlana Romanova. All three were arrested by the Gagarinsky District Court of Moscow at the request of the investigation in April 2017. Two more – former president of Mezhtrustbank Igor Boykov and member of the board of directors of the credit institution Sergei Lipatov – had the status of witnesses in this case for quite a long time. The situation changed after Igor Tsibulsky and Dmitry Redkin, who entered into pre-trial cooperation agreements with the prosecutor’s office, testified about their involvement in the withdrawal of money from the bank. In 2019, the Ostankinsky District Court of Moscow sentenced them for the theft of more than 2.5 billion rubles from the bank. to two years, ten months and three years of imprisonment, respectively. Ms. Romanova, who did not admit guilt, was sent to a penal colony for 4.5 years.JSC Rosgazifikatsiya increased labor productivity by 30% by creating an IT ecosystem for managing business activities
However, thanks to Igor Tsibulsky’s testimony, only Mr. Lipatov was detained in 2017. But the alleged organizer of the theft of the bank’s funds, Igor Boykov, could not be detained at that time. According to operatives, he went abroad and lived in the Netherlands for some time.
As stated in the case materials, the organized group he created operated from 2013 to 2016 and “was characterized by stability, cohesion, stability of its composition, a clear hierarchical structure, a strict distribution of criminal functions and roles between its participants, the presence of a common material, financial and technical base, the use of measures to conceal criminal activity, including by giving it the appearance of civil-law relations, and careful concealment of traces of the crime.”
The essence of the actions imputed to Mr. Boykov and his accomplices boils down to issuing knowingly non-repayable loans to both individuals and fictitious companies controlled by the former president of Mezhtrustbank. For example, among the recipients of loans totaling more than 2.5 billion rubles are almost three dozen LLCs that did not carry out any financial or economic activity. In particular, among them are “AllianceExtra”, “Veles”, “DorStroyProgress”, “Eurocomservice”, “Intercom” and others. At the same time, according to investigators, the fraudsters used such a mass of borrowers specifically to give the thefts “a legitimate appearance and conceal traces of the crime from the supervisory departments of the Central Bank.”[1].
