The Monaco po-lice, experts in directing traffic, determined, sans investigation, that Safra's widow was beyond suspicion in the death of her husband, even though she stood to gain $3 million by his death. No motivation there; the Monaco po-lice said so.
In other fraud news, former Bank of New York employee Svetlana Kudryavtsev was indicted on Jan. 27 for lying to FBI agents investigating money laundering at BONY. The indictment revealed the new estimate of funds in the Benex account at BONY: $4.85 billion.
$4.8 billion, $4.8 billion. . .the figger seems oddly familiar.
The Times
TUE 25 JUL 2000
Russian leader faces Pounds 3bn questions
Swiss officials are eager to question Mikhail Kasyanov,the Russian Prime Minister, over a $4.8billion (Pounds 3.2 billion) International Monetary Fund loan, a Moscow newspaper said yesterday.
Edmond Safra was not available for comment, although the chief prosecutor of Geneva was cited in The Times Russia Today as having said Safra was killed for cooperating with the FBI in the laundering of $4.8 billion in IMF loans to Russia through his Republic Bank.
A London analyst told Reuters (Dec. 3): “The thing that is worrying now is to what extent Safra’s business was worth buying. Safra kept his cards so close to the chest that his business was always a mystery... He is the only guy who knows where all the bodies are and his is dead.”
The New York Post (Dec. 4, 1999) reported that Mr. Safra was only in Monaco to hold meetings with HSBC’s John Bond.
The sale of Safra's bank to HSBC was approved after his death (Dec. 6), and his widow Lily retained attorney Stanley Arkin, who had defended the Natasha Kagalovsky below:
September 3, 1999
Bank of New York Dismisses Second Employee in Laundering Case
By RAYMOND BONNER
NEW YORK -- The Bank of New York said Thursday that it had dismissed a second employee involved in its investigation into possible money laundering at the bank.
The employee, Svetlana Kudryav tsev, was discharged for failing to cooperate with the bank's internal investigation into the suspected money laundering, a person close to the inquiry said. The bank refused to elaborate on the ouster.
Ms. Kudryavtsev joined the bank in 1994 and was an international bank associate in the Eastern European division in New York, a low level position akin to an administrative assistant, the person close to the investigation said.
Ms. Kudryavtsev could not be reached for comment.
She was discharged six days after the bank ousted a vice president in the Eastern European division, Lucy Edwards. Ms. Edwards, who worked in London, was dismissed for "gross misconduct," said a person with direct knowledge of the dismissal, including the falsification of bank records, failure to cooperate with investigators and for never telling the bank that she was married to Peter Berlin.
Berlin had opened accounts at the bank in the name of a company called Benex. Federal investigators say at least $4.2 billion, and perhaps up to $10 billion, was channeled through Benex accounts at the bank over 18 months starting some time early last year.
Although little is known about Berlin, investigators say they believe that the money came from criminal activities, political graft and corporate embezzlement in Russia and that it was being laundered for figures in organized crime in Russia. Some of the money was also probably capital flight, Russian executives and American law-enforcement authorities said, secreted out of the country last year, when Russia faced a grave financial crisis and its banks and currency collapsed.
Press reports have speculated that some of the money may have been diverted from loans by the International Monetary Fund or from food-aid programs. But the I.M.F. and the United States Government said they had no hard evidence of that.
Berlin and his wife, who was born Lydmila Pritzker and emigrated to the United States from Russia more than 20 years ago, lived in the in the New York area until a few years ago, when the bank transferred Ms. Edwards to London.
Neither the bank nor any employees, including the two who were dismissed, have been charged with wrongdoing by legal authorities. According to Reuters, Ms. Edwards issued a statement Thursday through her lawyer in London in which she "strenuously denied" the allegations on which the bank based her ouster. The statement said that Ms. Edwards was "pursuing the remedies available against the bank, and we have notified the bank accordingly."
The statement did not say what the allegations were, and neither has the bank.
A lawyer in New York for both Ms. Edwards and her husband, T. Barry Kingham, told Reuters, "Both Peter and Lucy firmly deny any wrongdoing."
Sorting out the exact sources of the money and the extent to which its movement violated any laws will take many months, perhaps years, American officials said. Layers of companies were used to disguise the origins and destinations of the money, and many of the companies were registered in places like the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea and Antigua, which have strict bank-secrecy laws and few disclosure requirements.
American law-enforcement officials said the only hope that they had of eventually getting to the bottom of the activity at the bank was with the full cooperation of the Russian Government.
Another senior bank officer whom investigators say they are looking at closely is Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky, who was in charge of the Eastern European division in New York and worked closely with Ms. Edwards. The bank suspended Ms. Kagalovsky, with pay, after the allegations of money laundering became public on Aug. 19.
Ms. Kagalovsky and her husband, Konstantin Kagalovsky, a prominent Russian businessman, have denied wrongdoing.
During an August 21 raid on the Bank of New York, U.S. federal investigators seized the files of Natasha Gurfinkel Kagalovsky, a senior vice president who supervised the bank’s East European division. She and the bank’s vice president in London, Lucy Edwards, were suspended. Ms. Kagalovsky is the wife of Konstantin Kagalovsky, Russia’s representative to the IMF in the early 1990s under Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar’s government. After Gaidar was replaced, Kagalovsky moved to Russia’s Bank Menatep, headed by Russian oil and banking baron Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Menatep snapped up a number of enterprises during Russia’s controversial "loan to share" privatization, including a controlling stake in the country’s second-largest oil company, Yukos. Menatep failed last year amid Russia’s financial crisis (see box on page 16). Kagalovsky is now deputy chairman of Yukos.
Investigators say Menatep and Kagalovsky increasingly are becoming a focus of the investigation. Federal and international law enforcement officials say they are looking into whether Kagalovsky helped construct a byzantine network of offshore corporations that politically connected or mob-linked Russians may have used to siphon hundreds of millions of dollars out of the country. Investigators say that sum may include part of foreign aid and funds pumped into Russia by the IMF to shore up the reeling Russian economy.
In other news, Ted Maher was screened for drugs and alcohol by Princess Grace Memorial Hospital, including the drugs he was forced to falsely confess to using by police torture.
Results were negative.
As Ted told U.S. Consul Patricia Feitz December 8, 1999, "What I do, I do for the safety of my family."