It had local and international clients in both the West and Russia with close ties to the Tambovskaya Russian mafia in St Petersburg and Vladimir Putin.

[1] Citadele was then sold to a group of United States investors while Reverta sued the founders Kargins and Krasovickis for €88 million due to 14 highly irregular loans and deposits between 1995 and 2008.

[1] On 5 August 1986, under the Riga's City Committee of the Komsomol, Gints Marga created Parex, which is a portmanteau of export parity, as a self supporting youth enterprise.

[2][3][a] Valērijs Kargins had been working at VEF but could not live on its salary so, in 1987, he purchased for five thousand Soviet roubles the Parex shell which was later reorganized into a cooperative and then a limited liability company for tourism.

Kargins owned half of the shares (valued at 1,086,200 Soviet roubles), while the remaining 50% were distributed in similar amounts between Viktors Krosovickis and his wife.

[9][10][12][13] Riga was intended to become the global financial center in the former Soviet Union and Parex Bank advertised that "We are closer than Switzerland!"

[25][26][27] In 2001, Jānis Skrastiņš [lv] (30 October 1949, Liepa, Liepa Parish - 10 July 2021), who was the first Prosecutor General of Latvia serving from September 1990 to August 1998 and drafted Latvia's Law on the Prevention of Money Laundering in 1997 following the April to June 1995 Banka Baltija financial crisis and collapse, was elected to the supervisory board of Parekss Banka and became its legal advisor and headed the anti money laundering division of the bank until 2009.

[29][32][33] In 2001, the ruling coalition of left wing groups at Riga, which were very close to the Kremlin[clarification needed], shifted all financial dealings with the mayor's office to Parex Bank.

[34] The Lithuanian branches of Parex were associated with pro-Russia, pro-Kremlin, and pro-Putin Viktor Yanukovych money laundering scandals with large support from the Donetsk Clan, which was formed by Akhat Bragin and headed by Rinat Akhmetov after Bragin's death on 15 October 1995, in the 2004 Ukrainian elections according to the Lithuanian newspaper Respublika.

Milltown Corporate Services had been registered in Ireland until 2005, then briefly in British Virgin Islands, then in Belize, then [38][39][40] Parex and its successor ABLV Bank were connected to the St Petersburg based Tambovskaya Russian mafia which is close to Vladimir Putin during his political rise.

In the second half of 2008, a number of large and pre-eminent banks and financial institutions went bankrupt, such as Lehman Brothers in the United States and Carnegie in Sweden.

[49][50] Arnis Lagzdins was the compliance official at Parex Bank during the crisis at Parex and its sister firm Overseas Services and later held the same position at Ūkio bankas in Lithuania when very large sums were money laundered allegedly by Vladimir Putin, Yuri Chaika, and the Russian Mafia including the Tambovskaya Organized Crime Group.

The inspection revealed significant shortcomings in the lending process; as the economic situation in Latvia and the world changed and the solvency of borrowers worsened, Parex had not set up the amount of provisions corresponding to the quality of the loan portfolio (40 million lats shortfall), as well as weaknesses in credit risk management.

[53] As a result of the restructuring carried out on 1 August 2010, Parex was split into two separate institutions; Reverta was founded as a "solution bank" with the aim of recovering the public funds invested in its rescue.

[53] On 15 March 2012, the Financial and Capital Market Commission (FCMC) supports the request of Parex banka and revokes the license of the bank's credit institution.

With an active portfolio of nearly one billion euros, Reverta is the largest asset manager in the Baltic region and ranked among the leading analogue companies in Eastern and Central Europe.

Claims were made of a 'chain reaction' that caused the crisis, which prompted the government to take a €4.5 billion in bailout loans from the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the World Bank.

Reverta sued the founders, Kargins and Krasovickis, for nearly €88 million from 14 highly irregular loans and deposits at Parex Banka which occurred between 1995 and 2008.