VIP Bank chairman Alexei Frenkel (left) and his lawyer Evgeny Martynov (right) on January 12, 2007 during a hearing in the case of the murder of Russian Central Bank first deputy chairman Andrei Kozlov.
Photo: Yury Martyanov
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Andrei Kozlov's Murder Cost Too Little
// To Keep His Killers from Talking
Today Moscow's Basmanny Court is due to decide the question of the arrest of former VIP Bank chairman Alexei Frenkel, whom the general prosecutor accuses of ordering the murder of Russian Central Bank first deputy chairman Andrei Kozlov last September. Mr. Frenkel is the seventh and arguably most important person arrested in connection with the crime, which was solved largely thanks to the stinginess of its organizers: they hired inexperienced killers to carry out the murder of one of the country's top bankers, and paid them only $10,000.
The banker Alexei Frenkel was arrested in Moscow at one o'clock in the morning on January 11. His arrest, according to the general prosecutor's office, was the final one in the four-month investigation into the murder of Andrei Kozlov. Although general prosecutor Yury Chaika does not rule out additional arrests, given that several intermediary accomplices have yet to be identified, investigators have all of the main participants in the murder behind bars and are now considering the case solved.
Last fall, the Moscow court sanctioned the arrests of the Ukrainian citizens Alexei Polovinkin, Maxim Proglyad, and Alexander Belokopytov, who together carried out the attack on Andrei Kozlov and his driver Alexander Semyonov. By the end of last year, two other participants in the organization of the contract killing, Ukrainian middleman Bogdan Pogorzhevsky and Moscow businessman Boris Shafray, had also been taken into custody. Last Friday, Liana Askerova, the co-owner of the Moscow restaurant Trish and the final link in the chain leading to Alexei Frenkel, was arrested on a precautionary two-month basis.
Investigators believe that Alexei Frenkel decided to eliminate Andrei Kozlov out of personal antagonism after the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank decided on June 15th of last year to strip Mr. Frenkel's VIP Bank of its license as punishment for money laundering. According to experts in the banking sector, the conflict between Andrei Kozlov and Alexei Frenkel arose in 2005, when the Central Bank refused to include VIP Bank in its system of deposit insurance, a decision that Mr. Frenkel challenged in court. Then Mr. Frenkel stepped down from the head of VIP Bank and undertook to personally represent the bank in court.
In that capacity, his behavior became outrageous in the extreme. In court, he threatened the Central Bank with millions of lawsuits seeking repayment of damages suffered by VIP Bank when it was not included in the list of selected insured banks. Outside the courts, according to witnesses, he constantly attempted to challenge Andrei Kozlov and other members of the Central Bank's leadership to conversation on points of controversy and attended every reception and social function in which Bank of Russia executives were participating. Andrei Kozlov always studiously avoided him. Around the same time, Mr. Kozlov started receiving phone calls supposedly from top officials in the FSB and in the general prosecutor's office, particularly from deputy general prosecutor Vladimir Kolesnikov (who occupied the post until the summer of last year), requesting that he include VIP Bank in the Central Bank's deposit insurance system. Later investigations revealed that the calls were made by imposters from private internal lines. Kommersant sources within the Central Bank believe that the calls were organized by Alexei Frenkel.
Nevertheless, Mr. Frenkel won his case in court against the Central Bank. On May 6 of last year, a Moscow court declared that the Central Bank's refusal to include VIP Bank in its list of insured banks was illegal. In the wake of that decision, acting on personal orders from Mr. Kozlov, the Central Bank carried out a special inspection of VIP Bank that resulted in the bank's license being revoked. Alexei Frenkel went to court again to challenge that decision, but, according to investigators, he also decided at that time to simply eliminate Andrei Kozlov from the picture – all the more so since, following the Central Bank's decision to strip VIP Bank of its license, billions of rubles on the bank's books that were destined to be converted into cash were instead frozen, provoking many of the bank's clients to ire at Mr. Frenkel.
According to investigators at the general prosecutor's office, since Mr. Frenkel had no contacts within criminal circles, the banker asked an acquaintance of his named Liana Askerova to organize a hit on Mr. Kozlov. Ms. Askerova, who met Mr. Frenkel when he patronized her restaurant, is said to have mentioned her ties to prominent underworld figures in Mr. Frenkel's presence more than once. She herself ran afoul of the law in 1995, when she was wanted on suspicion of fraud, but the case fell apart before it could come to trial.
Law-enforcement officials believe that Ms. Askerova agreed to help Mr. Frenkel, but the criminal "authorities" with whom she was in contact turned out to be a far cry from Godfather-style gangsters, and she failed to secure the services of any professionals for Mr. Frenkel's job.
Aiding Ms. Askerova in organizing the murder of Andrei Kozlov was her business partner, a Ukrainian businessman named Boris Shafray. It was he who found, according to investigators, a middleman from his native Lugansk named Bogdan Pogorzhevsky, who is known among the town's criminal elements as Bonya. After negotiations, it was decided that the liquidation of the Central Bank's first deputy chairman was worth only $10,000. Half of that sum went to Bonya himself, while the second half was used to buy two pistols and to hire the killers, also residents of Lugansk: Polovinkin, Proglyad, and Belokopytov. Together, the three drove to Moscow in their ancient Zhigulis to carry out the murder.
Detectives believe that the stinginess of the organizers and the killers' unprofessionalism played a large role in the quick unraveling of the case. The killers set out to murder Andrei Kozlov in the VAZ-2108 car belonging to Alexander Belokopytov, which they tried to drive straight into the parking lot of the Spartak sports complex where the Central Bank deputy was playing soccer on the evening he was killed. Guards at the gate refused to let the three men through, and one of the guards wrote down the license plate number of the suspicious vehicle. After Mr. Kozlov's murder, Alexander Belokopytov realized his mistake and tried to get rid of the car by driving to Stavropol to sell it, where he was detained a week after the killing. Belokopytov immediately ratted out his accomplices, who were quickly arrested in Moscow. All three cooperated fully with investigators and confessed to the crime.
However, the investigation then foundered for several months, until Bogdan Pogorzhevsky was apprehended until mid-December and fingered Boris Shafray in his confession. The Ukrainian was arrested on December 27. Unlike his co-conspirators, however, he refused to cooperate with the police at all and maintained his innocence. Since Mr. Shafray would not divulge the name of Liana Askerova, who was the only person who knew that the banker Alexei Frenkel had ordered the murder, the investigation again ground to a halt. Ultimately, it was Ms. Askerova who gave herself away: upon learning of Mr. Shafray's arrest, she became nervous and began to look for a lawyer for him, which brought her to the attention of the police. She was put under surveillance and her phone was tapped. By January 10, it had become clear to investigators that she was the last intermediary, the one who would lead police to the person who had ordered the killing, and on that day she was arrested in Moscow. During questioning Ms. Askerova was told that her accomplice, Boris Shafray, had betrayed her in a confession, a tactic that convinced her to give up Alexei Frenkel to the police.
Liana Askerova is now being held in a Moscow detention facility for at least the next two months, since her confession and a passport in her name containing several valid multiple-entry visas for different countries have given the authorities reason to think that she will try to flee the country if released. Though Ms. Askerova's lawyer, Evgeny Martynov, protested to the court that his client was innocent and that she was only planning to go abroad to receive treatment after a recent operation, the judge refused to be swayed.
Last Friday, Moscow's Basmanny Court was due to review the warrant from the general prosecutor's office for the arrest of Alexei Frenkel. However, Igor Trunov, a lawyer for Mr. Frenkel, succeeded in getting the hearing delayed, claiming that he was not sufficiently familiar with the materials of the case and was not allowed access to his client by investigators. "In the interest of ensuring the right of the accused to mount a defense," the judge rescheduled the hearing for January 15 and ordered that Mr. Frenkel remain in custody until then. The period of Alexei Frenkel's temporary detention in a Moscow police facility will expire on Monday at 14:00.
"I am absolutely not guilty" declared Mr. Frenkel to journalists assembled in the courtroom, calling his arrest a "Central Bank provocation against one of its opponents." Mr. Trunov explained that the provocation to which his client was referring was linked to the ongoing suit brought by VIP Bank against the Central Bank concerning the suspension of VIP Bank's license. According to Mr. Trunov, Mr. Frenkel has been seeking to resolve his conflicts with the Central Bank "by purely legal methods, and his arrest will influence the judges in the arbitration court, who now cannot be objective." "There was a large distance between Andrei Kozlov and Alexei Frenkel," said Mr. Trunov. "This is like saying that someone dissatisfied with the cleanliness of the vestibule of his apartment building would order the murder of the mayor of Moscow. If Frenkel was party to a murder, then after the arrest of the supposed perpetrators and accomplices, he had plenty of time to go into hiding. But he has been in the country the whole time. Is that supposed to mean that he was just waiting for them to come for him?"
Mr. Trunov also maintained that his client was beaten while in police custody, something that Mr. Frenkel himself mentioned in a memorandum concerning the accusations against him. "I plan to get an expert opinion and have all of the facts checked out," said Mr. Frenkel's lawyer, who was not permitted to meet with his client last weekend. Valery Karyshev, a lawyer who is defending Boris Shafray, added, "I have participated in many investigations into notorious murders and have defended honest-to-God killers, most notably Alexander Solonik. I have intuition [about these things], and believe me, neither my client nor Askerova, whom I know personally, had anything to do with the murder of Andrei Kozlov."
Nikolai Sergeev
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