Go to main page

By 2019 Central Bank is planning to complete «cleaning» bank sector of Russia from shady players and «potemkin’s banks». After this the country will end up with having around 400 banks, said in his interview to Reuters deputy Head of CB Vasily Pozdyshev. He also told, what main ways of fraud the regulator has to face.

According to Pozdyshev, the fight for recovery of bank sector is quite a challenge, because CB has to not only check whether capitalization of a certain bank is enough as the regulators normally do, but perform duties of an investigator on financial crimes.

Most often CB, according to Pozdyshev, faces withdrawal from banks under the pretence of giving loans to «unreal lendees»: «We’ve come to the conclusion that we are dealing with the whole business of creating unreal lendees. This is the service that is offered by the bank. They create a big quantity of legal entities, settle contracts between them (sales contracts, rental contracts, contracts of consulting services...), all these legal entities work with financial flaws».

Along with that, quite often such lendees look like fair companies and up to a certain time even pay taxes, which makes it more difficult to discover fraud. Central Bank figures them out by tax payments: many lendees, that pay equally minimal amount of taxes on the same day, reveal the fact that all of them perform under a bank-offender. But the regulator must prove that these companies don’t do any activities.

«We have to go to every lendee. We enter their offices, ask to turn on the computers... we have no choice but go to warehouses to see if this lendee really does some trade activity or owns what he has at the warehouse. Not one regulator in the world does such kind of work...», — told Pozdyshev.

According to him, another very popular scheme is mass fictitious loans to individuals. For that the forgers buy a retail data base of lendees from other banks and issue fictitious loans to real people, that are served in order to disguise, so that such pyramid can perform successfully during several years.

Another kind of fraud is loans manipulations. Here the forgers use two popular schemes. In the first case a bank without notifying a depositor withdraws his funds and uses them for its purposes, comforting the clients with the fake account statements issued with the help of a special program, which «completes» the sums taken by the bank.

The second way is the opposite — when a bank has no real depositors, but the data report shows that the money went through the cash department and was given as loans right away. «This is a criminal type of law violation, and it is used when a bank realizes that it will lose the license, in which case a bank does it on purpose to get compensation from the deposit insurance fund», — said Pozdyshev.

Unscrupulous schemes are used by some banks when placing funds on correspondent accounts of foreign counterparties. The money withdrawn abroad appears to be under one or another charging, that later on creates obstacles for returning it upon the request of appointed in the bank temporary administration.

«In some cases we have to deal with blatant fraud. It is one thing, when the account is under charging, but is another one — when a bank has a program, which changes the assets, adds several zeroes to them and presents in the report. There were the cases of fake SWIFT-messages, which a bank presented to us», — told Pozdyshev.

He also pointed out that the banks sometimes have problems because of a wrong strategy or economic miscalculation, but now Russian Central Bank is mainly facing the deliberate criminal actions of the bankers for the withdrawal.

ru/news/2017/03/06/cbr/

Back to the news list