Russian Central Bank First Deputy Chairman Andrey Kozlov, center, at a meeting of the Bank of Russia management and members of the Russian Association of Regional Banks in Feburary 2006.
Photo: Ilya Pitalev
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Central Bank Deputy Chairman Andrey Kozlov Murdered
Yesterday morning Russian Central Bank First Deputy Chairman Andrey Kozlov died in Moscow's city hospital #33. Kozlov had been wounded the night before in the head and neck. This is the first time that such a high-ranking official has been killed in Russia, but President Vladimir Putin, who is currently in Sochi, has so far had no comment. Investigators in the office of Russian General Prosecutor Yury Chaika are sifting through dozens of leads, all of which are somehow linked to Mr. Kozlov's activities as head of the Central Bank.
Two Contract Killers, One Baseball Cap
Andrey Kozlov died at 5:30 yesterday morning without regaining consciousness in Moscow's Ostroumov Hospital. Mr. Kozlov underwent a difficult neurological operation, but his head wound had caused brain damage that ultimately proved fatal.
Investigators have already managed to reconstruct the crime scene. That night, employees of the Central Bank played their usual Wednesday-night round of football at the Spartak stadium in Moscow. The victim was hard to pick out of the crowd of dozens that thronged out of the stadium after the games were over, so the killers hid in some bushes near the parking lot and staked out Kozlov's company Mercedes. Then, while Kozlov and his driver Alexander Semenov were putting their sports bags in the trunk, the killers opened fire. The Central Bank chairman was wounded first in the neck, after which one of the murderers shot him execution-style in the forehead. The banker's driver was shot twice in the back in the region of the heart as he tried to escape. Police and ambulance were called not by Mr. Kozlov's colleagues but by the administration of the stadium, which may explain why he was taken to a poorly-equipped Moscow hospital.
The perpetrators had little trouble gaining access to the grounds of the complex, since it is relatively unguarded. The stadium has an agreement with the security company "Areopag-S," but only the stadium building and two of the driveways up to the stadium, which are located about 200 meters from the scene of the crime, are patrolled by guards. The guards have no technology at their disposal: the only area of the complex that is equipped with video cameras is the Women's Jewish Institute, which is located off to the side of the sports stadium. Nevertheless, investigators have confiscated the recordings from that night, hoping that the perpetrators may have been caught on film.
The complex is surrounded on one side by a wooded area that leads to a street and on the other by the deserted bank of the river Yauza, which is separated from the stadium territory by a metal fence. Using holes in the fence, the killers could have easily gained entrance to the territory and escaped unnoticed after the crime. Investigators found two "Baikal" pistols that had been fired and tossed aside near the fence. The pistols had been crudely modified to fire army cartridges (several spent casings and a homemade silencing device were found at the scene of the crime). After the fence, the killers' tracks disappear into the woods: it would have taken them a maximum of three to five minutes to run through the woods to nearby Bolshaya Olenya street, where the getaway car was presumably waiting.
Descriptions of the killers give investigators few clues. The killers are described as being two men of medium build, 175-180 cm in height, who were wearing dark clothes. According to witnesses at the crime scene, who were located around 30 meters away, one of the killers was wearing a baseball cap. It is possible that something will come of records on mobile phone networks in the area that were requested by investigators. However, in recent years so many killers have been given away by phone calls that it is unlikely that the killers in this case would have made use of communications networks. As such, investigators are pinning their hopes on testimony given by Mr. Kozlov's colleagues.
According to information received by Kommersant, one of his colleagues has already informed investigators that the Central Bank deputy chairman may have been threatened by several commercial banks that were stripped of their licenses for illegal financial operations. The purported heads of these banks had been taking advantage of a certain loyalty felt by Mr. Kozlov, which made the sanctions imposed by the Central Bank all the more painful.
Retribution for Left Imports
This is the first time that such a high-ranking government official has been killed in Russia. However, President Putin has yet to react to the killing of the Central Bank's deputy chairman. At a government session yesterday, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov opened with a moment of silence in memory of Mr. Kozlov. "This is a serious loss," said the prime minister in his remarks. "He left behind three children. I would like to express my sympathy to his family and to his wife, Ekaterina Valeryevna." Mr. Fradkov's appeal to Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliev to "keep us informed as much as possible about the progress of the investigation" was misdirected: the affair is under the jurisdiction of the department of investigations into murder and organized crime in the Moscow general prosecutor's office. The affair is a criminal case of murder in which the victim was performing official duties.
In an official announcement, the Bank of Russia expressed its condolences to the family and close friends of the banker and his driver. As one of the chiefs of the Bank of Russia said, "work will go on, but just barely; we are all in shock, although to say that we are surprised would not be true – recent oversight [he was being watched by Mr. Kozlov] has damaged the interests of too many banks."
It is known that many of Mr. Kozlov's recent activities have caused significant damage to the interests of operators in the "grey imports" market. Most of the banking license reviews that took place after June 1, according to data from the Central Bank, were in connection with "clients engaged in suspicious cash-free operations." These operations made up the lion's share of the total sum of "suspicious" operations that were the reason for the review of the licenses of 33 banks in the summer of 2006. The total amount involved in such transactions was 438 billion rubles (around $16.2 billion over the course of two years). It should be noted that this is a conservative estimate – Kommersant's calculations dealt only with official records from the Central Bank concerning sums involved in suspicious operations; there are no records for many closed banks.
So-called "suspicious cash-free operations" are mainly "left payment imports" – schemes in which importers illegally minimalize their customs payments and VAT. The decrease in customs costs on goods by a "grey" importer does not free him from having to pay the real price of the imported goods to his foreign contractors. For such situations, many banks arrange fictitious payment to the client-importers at the address of the contractors in third countries, including countries of the CIS. The payment item can be almost anything, such as consulting services. The banking oversight of the Central Bank regularly blocked the possibilities for such operations by importers.
It is possible that, since other Central Bank leader could be assassination targets, they will be assigned bodyguards. Previously Mr. Kozlov's status, like that of other leaders of the Central Bank, did not rate bodyguards from the FSO, and Mr. Kozlov had recently refused security provided by the bank.
Yesterday the Association of Russian Banks (ARB) announced the creation of a fund to assist in the investigations into the murder of Andrey Kozlov. As ARB President Garegin Tosunian told Kommersant, the banks have decided not to divulge the amount of money accumulated in the fund so far. Today at a press conference the bankers will give out the number of a hot line set up to gather information for the investigation. "The fund is to reward those who provide information that helps the investigation into the murder and to reward whoever breaks the case," said Mr. Tosunian, who promised that the sum in both cases would be "more than appropriate."
For now, bankers and politicians are busy coming up with their own versions of what happened to Mr. Kozlov to get him killed: machinations of Chechen gangs that he had somehow stumbled across (the opinion of Nikolay Leonov, a member of the Duma security committee); Asian capital, whose inroads into Russia the Central Bank deputy chairman was supposedly hindering (Kirill Kabonov, chairman of the national anti-Corruption committee); a battle with financial structures who were laundering criminal money (Ilya Yurov, chairman of the board of directors of "Trust" bank); "vengeance from the side of thieves who had crept into the banking business" (Oleg Vyugin, head of the Russian FSFR). Or, as the vice president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Igor Yurgens, told "Echo of Moscow" in an interview, "people, including some in government positions, who were making money dishonestly and laundering it, who were subjected to the control of a person who combined in himself a professor, a theoretician of financial markets, and an excellent administrator."
Sergey Perekhodov
All the Article in Russian as of Sep. 15, 2006
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