Bank Menatep

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Bank Menatep was a US$29 billion holding company created by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, that had indirect controlling interest in Yukos Oil Company, and was involved in the US$4.8 billion diversion of International Monetary Fund (IMF) funds. The bank's financial condition was seriously damaged during the 1998 financial crisis due to a requirement by the Russian Central Bank that all commercial banks keep an economically untenable proportion of their reserve requirements in Russian treasury bills known as GKO, which subsequently collapsed, causing a default which led to the crisis and Bank Menatep's bankruptcy. The Central Bank revoked Menatep's licence in May 1999. However, according to Ernest Backes, former #3 of Clearstream, a clearing-house which has been qualified as a "bank of banks", Menatep maintained an unpublished secret account at Clearstream until at least 2000. The bankruptcy was finalized by February 2001. In an unprecedented move, the core shareholders of the bank, the financial holding Group Menatep, of which Khodorkovsky was a principal, made a decision to pay their own money to all 15,000 Bank Menatep small depositors whose savings had been wiped out by the collapse. A new Bank Menatep Saint Petersburg was created from the Saint Petersburg division of Bank Menatep. It accumulated the assets but not the liabilities of the original bank. In 2004 the bank was bought by the management and renamed to Trust National Bank.

[edit] The Kremlingate

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now in prison, has been accused of money-laundering, among other things. Menatep was implicated in the diversion of US$4.8 billion in International Monetary Fund funds lent to Russia in 1998: this gave rise to the Kremlingate. Funds have transited through Clearstream clearing-house, which has been qualified as a "bank of banks" and was accused, but never convicted, in a major scandal in Luxembourg.

Menatep Bank has also been accused by French journalist Denis Robert of having opened a non-published Cedel (predecessor to Clearstream) account on May 15, 1997, after Clearstream CEO André Lussi visited Khodorkovsky in Moscow. "Menatep further violated the rules because many transfers were of cash, not for settlement of securities", writes Lucy Komisar. "For the three months in 1997 for which I hold microfiches, Ernest Backes says, only cash transfers were transferred through the Menatep account. They were a lot of transfers between Menatep and the Bank of New York." Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky, a former Bank of New York official and the wife of Menatep vice president, was accused of helping launder at least US$7 billion from Russia, according to Komisar. US investigators have attempted to find out if some of the laundered money originated with Menatep. Furthermore, even though Menatep officially failed in 1998, it oddly remained on Clearstream accounts for 2000, as did the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), involved in another major scandal. In reaction to those accusations, Menatep filed a complaint against Denis Robert [1]. [2].

On 3 March 2004, Stephen Curtis, managing director of Group Menatep (created in 1997) since November 2003 (shortly after Khodorkovsky was arrested), and his pilot Matthew Radford died in a helicopter crash, near Bournemouth International Airport, in the south of England. In November 2005 a British jury concluded that the crash was probably accidental, finding evidence of sabotage "thin".[3] Stephen Curtis, a lawyer, had played a key role in creating Menatep's network of offshore structure in the 1990s, according to the Moscow Times [4].