"Rimšēvičs was among those who oversaw the creation of the Latvian banking sector in the 1990s, says Valery Kargin, co-founder of one of the oldest banks, Parex Banka. An important institution in those days, Parex had high-level Russian connections, including with Vladimir Putin before he was president, Kargin says."
"Any Soviet who went abroad, even in those final years of the USSR, would have been “of interest” to the KGB security apparatus, says Arnolds Babris, a top Latvian intelligence official from 1995 to 2002. Rimšēvičs bristles when asked if he’d needed any KGB ties to get to the U.S. He says he won the coveted place on the basis of his top grades and a good command of English."
"Valery Kargin was one of a handful of well-connected Latvian businessmen who made their fortune offering financial services in the early ’90s. Kargin co-founded Parex as a foreign exchange office in Riga after obtaining a license from authorities in Moscow in the months before the Soviet Union fell apart. He set up its headquarters in the building housing the Latvian branch of the Soviet Bank of Industrial Construction, or Promstroybank."
"As the Parex saga shows, there was a Wild West quality to Latvia’s banking landscape in those days. And Rimšēvičs was at the center of it. He was “one of the creators and curators of the current banking system, including the supervision,” Kargin says. The Financial and Capital Market Commission, which regulates Latvian banks, wasn’t established until 2001, the year Rimšēvičs became the central bank’s governor. Before then, regulation fell to the central bank. Since then, the governor and the finance minister jointly nominate the FCMC chairman, who is subject to parliamentary confirmation." [Starp citu, līdzīgi kā ar FKTK vadītāju, uz Noziedzīgi iegūtu līdzekļu legalizācijas novēršanas dienesta (Kontroles dienesta) priekšnieka amatu nominē Ģenerālprokurors.]
"In the early years, Parex’s Russian connections extended to Putin, then deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Kargin says the future Russian president personally authorized permission for Parex to open an office in Russia’s second-biggest city. Kargin also says that Putin’s now-deceased mentor in St. Petersburg, then-Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, was on friendly terms with Kargin and his Parex partner, Viktor Krasovitsky. In 1997, threatened with corruption charges, Sobchak fled to Paris, whisked away in an aircraft that had been chartered with the help of Putin, who was by then an aide to President Boris Yeltsin. In 1998, two years before he died under suspicious circumstances, Sobchak traveled to Latvia to attend a lavish party at Krasovitsky’s seaside villa, says Sobchak’s widow, Lyudmila Narusova, who went with him." [Starp citu, kāpēc izskanēja ziņas par Putina meitu kontiem Latvijas bankās? Tikai sagadīšanās.]
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat
"But the EU's own bailout entrenched Russia's position in the Cypriot financial system, when it forced Russian and other savers to convert 47.5 percent of all deposits above €100,000 into bank shares in what was called a 'bail-in.'
"The EU unintentionally handed over Bank of Cyprus [to the Russians]," Demetriades said.
"They thought they were cleaning up Cyprus from dirty money, but now it looks like they made things worse," he said.
The effect of the bailout was "very ironic, almost surrealistic," Michel Koutouzis, a French criminologist, who previously worked for the EU and UN, also told EUobserver.
"It made Russian capital stronger because Cypriot banks now needed that money more than ever," he said.
That, in turn, gave Russian oligarchs the power to call the shots, he added. "'If you don't do as I say, then tomorrow I'll withdraw a billion, or two billion, from your bank' - that's how it works," Koutouzis said."
https://euobserver.com/justice/1429
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