"The Bank of New York Mellon [BNY] and the Russian government have agreed to settle a $22.5 billion lawsuit relating to a 1990s money laundering scandal, with the bank paying the government's legal fees of about $14 million, Russia's finance minister said Wednesday. ... Separately, the [BNY] agreed to offer a line of credit to Russian state banks to finance import and export business, the finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin, said in testimony to Parliament. The $400 million loan on favorable terms, though, would be an 'act of good will' not formally linked to the settlement, he said. 'It has nothing to do with costs of the court case, and is not an admission of guilt.' ... The bank conceded a rogue employee had laundered $7.5 billion from Russia through the bank in the 1900s, but said it had admitted no criminal wrongdoing. ... Jonathan D. Schiller, a managing partner of Boies, Schiller & Flexner who is representing the bank, also drew attention to Mr. Kudrin's remarks Wednesday before the Russian Parliament that the bank had comitted no crime", my emphasis, Andrew Kramer at the NYT, 17 September 2009, link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/business/global/17bony.html.
No admission of guilt. Has the SEC a Moscow office? I will be curious to see if Russia got other concessions from the BNY which were not disclosed. Yet. Was the loan 'informally" linked? I last mentioned this case on 9 November 2008: http://skepticaltexascpa.blogspot.com/2008/11/moscow-vs-ny-justice.html.
1 comment:
There's never any guilt... these firms just stumble into these practices... sure...
Why not do it... they know that no one will punish them... it's all just a cost of doing business...
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