A curious item appeared in the Russian media early last week regarding the murder in September of the first deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank Andrei Kozlov.

After 35-year-old Russian citizen Alexei Frenkel was arrested in Moscow on Jan. 11 for ordering Kozlov’s murder, it was widely assumed that the case had been all but solved. A few observers have noted the peculiarity of such a relatively minor operator being behind such a gangland-type operation, but these objections have largely been overshadowed by Russia’s steamroller justice system.
Last week, however, a report appeared in Russian daily Vremya Novostei suggesting that the trail may lead further — to corrupt Turkmen bankers previously implicated in a scheme to embezzle $40 million from a Turkmen Central Bank fund.
As Ivestia has also reported:

Half of this money found its way to a Latvian bank, Lateko. As this newspaper has already reported, one of the current suspects in Kozlov’s murder, Boris Shafrai, had previously worked for this bank.

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In September 2002, it was discovered that a number of employees at the Turkmen Central Bank had gained access to the organisation’s international payments system and stole large sums of cash from the lender’s accounts in Deutsche Bank. The money was quickly shuffled from one bank to another — including Russky Depozitarny Bank (RDB) and Indeksbank.
At least one criminal proceeding followed from this — the head of RDB, Dmitry Leus, was sentenced to a four year sentence in 2004.
As Leus’s lawyer Anna Stavitskaya explained: “The investigation established that half of the $40 million had been placed on an account at at Lateko Bank. The rest of the money was placed in RDB. This money was later removed and placed in Indeksbank. The head of RDB was sentencedm but the heads of Indeksbank Aisoltan Niyazov and Savely Burshtein managed to avoid the probe. To this day, neither they nor the money have been found.
It cannot be excluded that it is this affair that led Shafrai to order the killing of Kozlov (Note: Shafrai was arrested for personally hiring the individuals charged with Kozlov’s murder).
Accoridng to his former lawyer, Valery Karyshev, Shafrai is now actively cooperating with the investigation, while Frenkel continues to maintain his innocence.
As Ivestia has also previously reported, Shafrai has long-standing relations with Lateko Bank. As the son of Kazakh businessman Nikolai Usatov, Dmitry, has claimed, in 2005 Shafrai transferred $2.5 million between his own companies, both of which were registered under that bank accounts.
In Anna Stavitskaya’s opinion, Moscow-based Indeksbank was a typical “pocket bank”. It was founded in 2002 and closed down shortly after this transfer was concluded.
It is curious that Indeksbank is best known as a large Ukrainian bank — it has branches in Dnepropetrovsk, where Shafrai was born, and in Lugansk, where Kozlov alleged killer hailed from. Can this coincidence be entirely casual. It is possible that the clone bank in Moscow was set up for this very operation.

As Finans magazine reported, Niyazov and Burshtein may soon be officially declared as wanted suspects in the murder the case, although no official announcement has yet been made. A third former member of Indeksbank’s board, Yevgeny Obzhirov, is also being sought in connection with the killing. Although no charges had been placed on him in relation to the Turkmen embezzlement allegations, Finans reports that he cannot be located.
As for the Deutsche Bank link, this may be related to allegations put forward by a Global Witness report, among other places, that the Turkmen government was using the lender as deposit foreign exchange fund. A former Turkmen Central Bank Chairman Khudaiberdy Orazov claimed that the cash, mostly funneled away from the country’s significant energy-related income, was being used as former President Saparmurat Niyazov’s own “personal spending money,” Spiegel reported.
If for no other reason, the Turkmen authorities would be as uncomfortable with the idea of insiders like Aisoltan Niyazov, Burshtein, and Obzhirov spilling the beans to Muscovite authorities, thus leading to embarrassing indiscretions in the Russian press, as they would be keen for these individuals to be put in their charge.