The Russian Laundromat was a scheme to move $20–80 billion out of Russia from 2010 to 2014 through a network of global banks, many of them in Moldova and Latvia.
[2] The analyzed documents contained the details of approximately 70,000 banking transactions, according to Bloomberg, with 1,920 firms in the UK and 373 in the US involved.
Moldindconbank is the more important of the two: it was established on 1 January 1959 as a branch of the Construction Bank of the USSR to primarily finance Moldovan industries and construction businesses but was reorganised when the Soviet Union fell; as of 2022 it is the second largest bank in Moldova by asset value.
[9] In 1998, Platon entered politics as a member of the Municipal Council of Chișinău on the lists of the electoral bloc of agrarians.
[3] On 20 March 2017 the British paper The Guardian reported that hundreds of banks had helped launder KGB-related funds out of Russia, as uncovered by the investigation named Global Laundromat.
[3] On 27 March 2017, The Herald in Scotland reported that Scottish shell companies were used as part of the scheme, estimated at $5 billion.
[5] By June 2017 the UK watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority, had demanded information from HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland concerning the Russian Laundromat.
[3] More than $6 billion was fraudulently moved, laundered or embezzled from Kazakhstan's BTA Bank by its former chairman and CEO Mukhtar Ablyazov.
[14] In response to the reports, HSBC stated that it was against financial crime and that the case "highlights the need for greater information sharing between the public and private sectors".
[16] Under the direction of CEO Dmitrijs Latiševs, it was renamed as BlueOrange and reoriented towards domestic customers and the European market.