Leak reveals how Swiss firm Finaport manages assets for clients accused of fraud and corruption

A leak from Finaport, an asset management firm based in Zurich, shows that the company worked with clients including political celebrities, two Russians accused of embezzling funds from a bank they own, and a businessman accused of insurance fraud.

• A 2022 data leak from Finaport shows that this asset management company provided services to clients who were involved in legal scandals at the time.

• A Finaport customer withdrew more than $500 million from a Russian bank account that later collapsed.

• Another customer created bank accounts under an alternate identity and transferred money to them despite concerns raised by bank intelligence.

• Finaport also worked with a businesswoman who was the romantic partner of the head of a Russian state-owned firm that supported the war effort in Ukraine.

The leaked documents were briefly published online by the Russian hacker group ALPHV in February. They were obtained by Swiss Television (RTS) and shared with reporters in OCCRP, Le Monde and Der Spiegel. Reporters then obtained court records, searched commercial databases, and interviewed anti-money laundering experts, academics, and activists to confirm and interpret the leaked data and confirm the past of Finaport customers. BIRD gained access to the documents as a partner of OCCRP and studied the data relevant to Bulgarian clients, including a relative of a well-known former politician.

A dozen sensitive customers

At first glance, the client list of boutique Swiss investment firm Finaport Holding may seem extremely clean.

Between 2017 and 2019, the company, which manages bank accounts, companies and other assets for its wealthy clients, filed only two suspicious transaction alerts with the Swiss regulator, according to an internal audit.

However, during this same period, Finaport represented over a dozen clients who had high-level political connections, were accused of corruption, or faced criminal charges.

Those clients include a former Afghan minister sacked amid corruption allegations, a Peruvian politician linked to a large-scale bribery scandal at Car Wash, and the son of a former Uzbek intelligence chief. But many of those with the clearest red flags were Russians.

Finaport said that the information in the leak was an “arbitrary, outdated and incomplete selection” and that “drawing conclusions from it about Finaport’s business activities leads to false and/or misleading insinuations.”

The “nonsense” of due diligence

The leaked correspondence shows that Finaport employees were willing to reject due diligence (KYC) requests from banks – sometimes in harsh terms. In 2016, when an employee of the investment bank Julius Baer wrote to Finaport to ask questions about the source of a client’s wealth, a senior Finaport employee answered him with apparent disbelief.

“This is not even ‘compliance’ – this is pure harassment,” the employee wrote. “This is becoming ridiculous… Where did the spirit “can” and common sense disappear…? [The client] will leave with his assets to a bank in [Liechtenstein] in the coming days. Shall I congratulate them?”

Referencing the exchange of messages to a colleague, he wrote: “This is the nonsense they make us deal with.” (Finaport said that the employee was disappointed as he had been asked for the same information repeatedly and that it would be wrong to draw conclusions about “insufficient compliance culture at Finaport or even due diligence violations from this one-time incident.”)

With fewer than 50 employees, Finaport says its goal is to “preserve wealth and generate revenue” for its clients by “striving to invest in a highly ethical and sustainable manner.”

Since the leak, it has not been possible to establish how many transactions Finaport monitors or processes for its customers each year. But compliance experts said many of the transactions detected by reporters must have at least raised “red flags” and triggered an alert to the Swiss Money Laundering Reporting Service, known as MROS.

Swiss law requires wealth management firms such as Finaport to report transactions to MROS if they have “reasonable grounds to suspect that the assets involved in the business relationship are related to crime,” or if the funds or assets involved may be “proceeds of crime.” ”

Some important customers

Leonid Reiman
Former Russian Minister

Leonid Reiman is a former Russian minister of information who became an adviser to Vladimir Putin. Despite his political background, Finaport did not classify Reimann as a “politically exposed person” — someone whose political environment makes them a riskier client — in recordings from 2017 or 2019. including the Wall Street Journal. (Reiman has denied the allegations.) Finaport accepted Reiman as a client just two years later, and he remained on its books until 2021. In 2010, a few weeks after the end of his term as minister, Finaport and Reimann jointly developed plans to open a bank, although they were not implemented. Reimann did not respond to requests for comment.

Gustavo Salazar Delgado
Peruvian businessman

Former lawyer and insurance businessman Gustavo Salazar Delgado has been accused by Peruvian authorities of giving more than $1 million in bribes to a regional governor as part of a large-scale “Car Wash” corruption scandal. In 2017, he fled the country after a court issued an 18-month sentence for “preventive arrest” against him in the case. Media reports in 2020 and 2021 said Delgado was in the U.S. and that Peruvian authorities were working with the Department of Justice to extradite him back to Peru. Reporters could not confirm his current whereabouts. Delgado became a client of Finaport in 2014. Finaport lists it as a high-risk customer, which is due to “risk in the country”. Reporters did not find any mention in Finaport’s records of the allegations against him. The data leak suggests that Finaport ended its relationship at the end of January 2022.

Sharif Inoyatov
Son of Rustam Inoyatov – an influential figure in Uzbekistan

Sharif Inoyatov, 49, is the son of Rustam Inoyatov, the former head of Uzbekistan’s National Security Service. Rustam Inoyatov was the most powerful and fearsome general in the country. He was chairman of Uzbekistan’s National Security Service from 1995 to 2018 and as an adviser to President Shavkat Mirziyoyev until 2021. that he does not “understand how something like this can happen”. The staff member who hired Inoyatov had to update the files and attend internal training. But Inoyatov was left as a client. Finaport estimated Sharif Inoyatov’s fortune at over $50 million. Sharif and Rustam Inoyatov did not respond to requests for comment.

Abdul Rahim Wardak
Former minister and general in Afghanistan

Abdul Rahim Wardak is a former minister and army general in Afghanistan who was responsible for military and security cooperation with NATO. The corruption charges brought against him by Afghan members of parliament were reported in international media, including the New York Times and the BBC, at the time. (Wardak denied the allegations.) This media coverage was not mentioned in Finaport’s 2017 due diligence report, when the company accepted him as a customer. He remained a client until 2019.

Matteo Goretti Comolli
Argentine political adviser

Matteo Goretti Comolli is a career political adviser in Argentina. He was once an adviser to Mauricio Macri, who later became president. In 2015, Goretti was charged, along with former Culture Minister Hernan Lombardi, of laundering funds previously stolen from the Buenos Aires municipal government. The case was eventually dismissed. But Finaport added Goretti as a client in December 2016, when the case was still active. Despite his origins, leaked Finaport materials seen by reporters make no mention of his political connections. Goretti did not respond to requests for comment.

The leak also revealed that Finaport hardly hesitated to put itself at the service of Yuri and Alexei Khotin. These Russian billionaires, sometimes referred to as “secret oligarchs,” are suspected by Russian justice of having diverted to Cyprus the equivalent of two billion euros from Ugra Bank between 2014 and 2017. Shortly after, he transferred $587 million to a mysterious Cypriot offshore company. A few months later, Yugra Bank went bankrupt, leaving 16,000 customers in trouble.

Bank Alerts

These revelations about Finaport also call into question the responsibility of banks, most often Swiss and in Monaco, which maintained the bank accounts of Finaport customers – no one wanted to react to our investigation, hiding behind bank secrecy. However, the leakage of information implies greater caution on their part, since on several occasions it is the banks that alert Finaport about their mutual customers.

When in 2018 the Lombard Odier bank was worried about the corruption allegations published in the press against Anatoly Przegornitsky, a Finaport employee supported the client’s argument condemning “fake news” and a file “without evidence”.

When in 2019 the Mirabaud bank blocked a transaction of Alexander Kondratenkov after discovering that this big insurance boss had just been convicted of misappropriation of public funds, Finaport came to the rescue, assuring that he was not a “risky” client – even if he had fled Russia and opened a bank account under a middle name, Alexander García Feskov. using a Chilean passport obtained under dubious conditions.

Also, Reyl Bank alerted Finaport in October 2022 about the case of Alexander Mikhailovich Ponomarenko. The partner and children of this Russian businessman, the head of the public treatment company Mosvodokanal, entrusted Finaport with the management of nearly $ 50 million, despite serious suspicions about the origin of these funds. Internal company documents suggest that these inconvenient customers were detained after the invasion of Ukraine, although Mosvodokanal publicly assists the Russian army in its recruitment campaigns for the front.

Based on materials from OCCRP and Le Monde. Header photo: RTS / Gregory Bindschedler

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This post is also available in: Български (Bulgarian)