But the program evolved into operating businesses for off-budget revenues, and from there into avenues for squirreling away funds for the safe retirement or political comeback of embattled communist leaders.
[18][19] Ermarth stated that the Soviet Union was engaging in this scheme in 1985 and, in the 1990s, Russia had many that were "squirreling away funds for the safe retirement or political comeback of embattled communist leaders.
[22][f] In November 1990, the offshore structure Fimaco (also spelled Fimako) was formed by documents signed by Yury Ponomaryov under the direction of V. Gerashchenko of the Russian Central Bank, then known as Gosbank, to hide these funds.
[21][28][29][g][h] According to Sergei Tretyakov, KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov sent US$50 billion worth of funds of the Communist Party to an unknown location in the lead up to the collapse of the USSR.
[40][41][i] Russian officials claimed that FIMACO was 100% owned by the state-owned Banque Commerciale pour l'Europe du Nord, but never provided any proof according to a Newsweek article in March 1999.
[46][k][l] Ponomaryov was the principal executor during the privatization of funds of international financial organizations and state foreign exchange reserves of Russia through FIMACO and other shadow companies.
[47] BCEN - Eurobank had numerous correspondent accounts with Western banks to secure lines of credit for facilitating financial flows from the Soviet Union and later Russia to both the West and also less developed countries.
[51][54] ALM was the preferred law firm for Russian oligarchs during the 1990s including Alisher Usmanov, Roman Abramovich, Boris Berezovsky, Oleg Boyko, and others.
[51][55][56] During the 1990s, Mikhail Kasyanov, while he was the head of the department of external loans and foreign debt at the Russian Ministry of Finance, made decisions in support of Mamut.
[57] In Autumn 1990, Vladislav Surkov established an advertising company with support from Menatep Bank that achieved tremendous return on investments.
[58] With offices in Paris, Gibraltar, Budapest, and Geneva, Mikhail Khodorkovsky's MENATAP united a trading house, 2 insurance companies, 18 independent commercial banks, and about 30 industrial and other enterprises according to Delovoy Mir (Russian: «Деловой мир») on 8 June 1991.
In addition to Nikolai Kruchina and Viktor Geraschenko, Russian prosecutors also considered Veselovsky to be a principal figure in the money transfers.
[1][89][90][91] Felipe Turover Chudínov, a senior intelligence officer with the foreign-intelligence directorate of the KGB, alleged that $15 billion of IMF funds had been funneled through Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Caribbean countries as black cash or obschak to support Kremlin friendly operations and companies.
[100][r][s][t] Turover said that this prevented the typical Cold War cash flows through VEB to pro Kremlin operations and companies and caused, instead, schemes to be established.
[110][112] Because of this very large loss of assets, Russia needed over $300 billion in foreign investments and demanded even more IMF money during 1998 and 1999 in order to not declare bankruptcy in the spring of 1999.
"[127][128][129] FIMACO's existence was disclosed by Russia's chief prosecutor Yuri Skuratov in February 1999 when Skuratov stated about $50 billion was transferred from the Central Bank to FIMACO and then out of Russia including IMF funds between 1993 and 1998 and that he had given to Carla del Ponte, the Prosecutor General of Switzerland, a list of about twenty names which had received a total of $40 billion of the IMF money in accounts at Swiss banks.
[142][z] Reports by Swiss and German intelligence implicated numerous persons in the Russian mafia through Grigory Luchansky [ru; uk; de]'s Vienna, Austria based Nordex and Boris Birshtein's Zurich Switzerland based Seabeco AG, KGB, FSB, and others in the scheme to move billions away from the Soviet Union and into a secret economy.
[156][ac] In a 31 August 1999 interview with Libération, Michel Camdessus, the managing director of IMF, refused to call the flight of capital a theft and dismissed any money laundering, but was "worried" that Russia had lied to the IMF about the state of its reserves (French: «la Banque centrale russe nous a menti sur l'état de ses réserves en 1996 et ses transactions légales mais dissimulées avec la Fimaco»).
In early September 1999, Patrice Delozière, who is a Paris-based representative of the Central Bank of Russia at Eurobank, told Libération that "the PricewaterhouseCoopers audit was only provisional" (French: «le rapport Price Waterhouse n'est que provisoire»)[157][158] The stolen IMF funds caused the Russian financial crisis of 1998 which began on 17 August 1998.