Alexei Frenkel, who has been charged with organizing the murder of Central Bank Deputy Chairman Andrei Kozlov September 13, said in a letter he wrote a month before his arrest January 11 that he planned to expose a scheme which helped the Central Bank launder money through banks whose licenses it was going to revoke, Kommersant said.
Frenkel, former chairman of the board in the VIP-bank, said his bank's license had been canceled three months before Kozlov's murder because it had refused to cash money for Central Bank officials. The letter, however, did not cite the names of those allegedly involved in the scheme, the paper said.
The banker also said the Central Bank had denied entry into the deposit insurance system, which allows banks to work with individual accounts, to banks with impeccable financial reports.
"Facts confirm that the Central Bank made full use of the selective principle when including banks into the deposit insurance system," Frenkel wrote in his letter carried by Kommersant, and added that the law on money laundering had been designed specifically for the purpose.
"The Central Bank does not care about economic crimes or the funding of terrorism," he said. "A simple formula has been invented. It is enough to find two delayed reports to the financial monitoring service a year, which happens with at least 95% of banks, and there you go - repeat violations of law 115."
The Russian Prosecutor General's Office reacted immediately to the letter, saying it was a defensive move.
"Custody may have this effect on people and their thoughts, they start writing letters and appeals. Why didn't he say this before?" First Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Buksman said.
