Billions of dollars have been laundered through big-name global banks by the Russian A7 payments fintech, according to research into leaked material by the Financial Times. The payments broke money laundering and sanctions rules in multiple jurisdictions and relied on a global network of front companies and forged documents, rather than high-tech evasion tactics.
The FT identified that some Russian payments were for “extremely sensitive war-related goods,” including weapons. It said the deception involved an “industrial scale” forgery operation producing fake stamps and invoices for genuine companies.
