Criminal transit at ABLV Bank: Andris Ovsjannikov laundered €50 million through sham schemes involving Facilicom, Woodhouse, and Manat

Criminal transit at ABLV Bank: Andris Ovsjannikov laundered €50 million through sham schemes involving Facilicom, Woodhouse, and Manat

As Russian courts move to quietly close the chapter on the ABLV Bank scandal, fresh evidence pointing to the large-scale flight of capital continues to surface.

Behind the clean façade of companies like Facilicom and Woodhouse, banker Andris Ovsjannikov and businessman Eduard Apsit built a giant shadow pipeline — siphoning billions of rubles, some originally designated for cleaning Crimean military barracks, straight into shell companies in Belize and Cyprus.

Its former owners are accused of laundering €2.1 billion. They plead not guilty. A parallel process is underway to recover the money from the bank’s creditors. The legal proceedings could drag on for several more years.

Latvia’s ABLV Bank was supposed to be a "window to Europe" for residents of the CIS countries, but instead, it became a haven for various shady characters. Liquidated in 2018, the credit institution may be implicated in further scandals involving the bank’s creditors.

One of the scandals is the accusation against banker Andris Ovsjannikov of laundering 50 million euros. In addition to ABLV Bank, the criminal scheme involved a certain Darya Terekhova from Belarus and her company, Manat. The banker has been arrested, but nothing is known about Terekhina. She may be hiding in Minsk.

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Recently, reports surfaced that Ovsyannikov and Terekhina were scrubbing the internet. It’s possible the information was planted deliberately, to distract investigative journalists from the more prominent figures the banker and his accomplice were working for.

The international investigative journalism network OCCRP uncovered the bank’s criminal scheme in October 2021.

The ABLV Bank case is currently being heard by a specially created court – the Latvian Court of Economic Cases. Its chairman, Mikelis Zumbergs, predicted last year that the total number of cases against the bank could exceed a thousand, and that they would take several years to resolve.

Which Russians surfaced in the OSS RP investigation ? 

Eight were connected to the commodities trader Gunvor, previously owned by oligarch Gennady Timchenko, a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Timchenko has a stake in Novatek, so both its chairman and largest shareholder, Leonid Mikhelson, could be implicated.

Timchenko’s business partners include oligarchs Iskander Makhmudov and Andrey Bokarev, who are considered pro-Kremlin. The business activities of Makhmudov and his former subordinate, Maxim Liksutov, have been widely reported in Latvian media.