Word: russian
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Natasha Gurfinkel had moxie. Nothing if not aggressive as a senior vice president in charge of the Bank of New York's East European division, the Russian-born, Princeton-educated businesswoman charmed and cajoled, wined and dined her way to the forefront of the correspondent banking business in the heady days of Russia's breakaway from communism. Muscling out American rivals through her web of Moscow connections, she turned the Bank of New York into the biggest U.S. servicer of Russian accounts, moving along the flood tide of cash rolling out of the ebullient new economy in return for lucrative...
...chairman Alan Greenspan, urging the Fed to let Inkombank open a representative office in the U.S. Never mind that 14 months earlier some of the bank's largest shareholders had filed suit charging Inkombank with outright theft of $40 million in capital. Or that just a month before, the Russian central bank had issued a harshly critical audit of Inkombank irregularities...
Inkombank never got the license. But it was not until Republic National Bank turned the tables on Gurfinkel by filing a suspicious-transactions report on the extraordinary Russian cash flows through its bank to the Bank of New York in the summer of 1998 that anyone at Hamilton's respected house paid attention to what was going on. And it was not until last month, when the New York Times reported that an investigation was in progress, that the U.S. woke up to some ugly truths about Russia. With the bank's cooperation, the Feds are on the trail...
...scandal that set off Washington's alarms was the one that touched home at the Bank of New York. Federal agents were tipped off in August 1998 that unusually large amounts of money were zooming through the bank from Russian sources. Over the next 11 months, with the bank's cooperation, the Feds watched while at least $4.2 billion passed through several accounts, notably belonging to a mysterious British company called Benex Worldwide, then out to a confusing array of other banks and companies...
...Russia's central bank transferred more than a billion dollars of hard currency to an overseas company called FIMACO. After Russia's chief prosecutor leaked word of the suspicious off-shore company, the bank eventually apologized, explaining politely that the money had been hidden to protect precious Russian assets from foreign claims and insisting that no laws had been broken. But Russian Duma Deputies charge that the central bank hid the reserves to lure more cash from the INF. The INF has so far uncovered no evidence of illegal diversion of its loans, but is now looking hard...