STOPCRIME.RU - “Steal Sunflower Seeds - Go to Prison. Steal Billions

One of the first interested readers of the book D-Day was Colonel Ivan Alexandrovich Guryanov, the former Deputy Head of the Investigative Unit of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Internal Affairs Ministry from 1994 through 2000. It was he who, in his day, headed a number of criminal “false payment advice” cases, part of the materials of which the authors of the book found in the United States during their investigation. Andrei Kalitin, author of the book D-Day met with Ivan Guryanov.

-   I know that you’ve read the book and remembered the criminal cases with regard to the “false payment advices.” What is your impression of it?
-   You want to know my impression? I would like to forget the whole story; the memories are so disgusting about the entire epoch of the plundering of the country! But, of course, one must remember how it all happened. And the main question is why it happened. After all, as soon as the first false payment advice appeared in the country, it should have been shouted from the rooftops! Why wasn’t this done?
-   Why?
- The authorities found it advantageous to sweep it all under the rug and cover up the people involved in the criminal cases. The book talks about Mikhail Chernoy, the first aluminum magnate. One must understand that his takeover of such an important industry as the aluminum industry in effect undermined the state’s economic security. So not only we, the central apparatus of the Internal Affairs Ministry (MVD), but the Federal Security Service (FSB) had to focus on it. But why did the FSB stand aside? Not everything in this story is so simple…
      I first worked in the central apparatus, in the Main Investigative Office of the USSR Internal Affairs Ministry, from 1984 through 1990, and in 1990 I was appointed Deputy Minister of the Tatarstan MVD. And when such a type of crime as machinations with payment advices had only recently surfaced, the Deputy Public Prosecutor of the Republic and I did everything we could to keep the new type of crime, which was unfamiliar to investigators and active-duty officers, out of the republic. How? The Prosecutor and I came to an agreement that if there is ever the slightest reason to suspect someone of committing a banking crime, we will detain him. And at that time in Tatarstan, the law said that someone under suspicion could be detained for up to a month. Of course, it is a severe measure, but that is what we began to do so as not to allow financial scams to undermine the republic’s budget.
     Meanwhile, the courts would constantly poke sticks into the wheels. For example, we would send a false payment advice case to court, and they would say, “first figure out who sent the payment.” But this is ridiculous. Criminals send these payment orders to themselves through front organizations, sometimes from one office to another. And in court they say this is insufficient to establish who illegally obtained a profit, that we must establish who the low-level perpetrators are…It was difficult for us, but on the whole we solved the problem, and the machinations with false payment advices in the republic ceased. Because the political will was there.
     But when I was transferred to work in Moscow in 1994 in the investigative unit of the Investigative Committee, the case folders on the payment advices were in the possession of Sergei Glushenkov. The department was rather large, and the cases were very complex. When we looked at all the materials, I understood that the investigators on the cases had only a set of unsystematized facts…Somebody was involved somewhere, somebody else somewhere else…The same set of companies might figure in the cases several times…like an octopus.
-   In other words, it was difficult to put together a logical chain and figure out who was behind it?
-   Exactly. It was difficult to figure out where the source of all the troubles was, who led all of the criminal syndicates. And then I insisted on singling out several cases from the bunch, all of which were, by the way, taken to court. And in connection with these cases, about 30 people were brought to justice, and, by the way, it was from the case involving Chernoy. At least something was accomplished. But it seemed that the investigator Sergei Glushenkov didn’t want anything to get done. As a matter of fact, he only concerned himself with the Chernoy brothers. He investigated all of these cases for a year, then another year, feeding us stories about how there wasn’t enough material and that he had to get some answers from overseas (Mikhail Chernoy lived in Israel at the time), complete an expert examination. This went on for years. Finally, we were very surprised when he suddenly gave an interview to some Israeli journalists in which he unexpectedly stated that the Chernoy brothers were “not involved at all.” Of course, technically he’s right. There was no charge, so the person is innocent…But that’s the main question - why was no charge brought? He always told us that there wasn’t enough evidence, but I think that there was enough evidence to charge Mikhail Chernoy with a crime.
-    In other words, you think that there were serious grounds to charge Chernoy with a crime and investigate him?
-     Yes, I think there were very serious grounds…With regard to the criminal case about the false payment advices involving Vadim Yafyasov, who gave us testimony and who, by the way, was killed soon afterward. On the one hand, we see economic crimes that were committed by these so-called “businessmen,” and on the other we understand that the same players may be investigated on the suspicion of murdering their former partner Yafyasov! All of that should have been united into a single whole and worked on jointly with the Prosecutor’s Office. But nobody did that! Even though Yafyasov had directly testified against Chernoy on the payment advice cases. And I think that, taking into account the indirect evidence, it would have been possible to question Chernoy as the beneficiary in this scam. But Glushenkov is an experienced investigator, and if he said that some sort of evidence was lacking, then we trusted him at that time. And as an investigator, he had procedural independence. We could, for example, give a recommendation to file a charge, but if the Prosecutor thought there wasn’t enough evidence, then nothing would happen. Basically I think that the reason for the confusion - the fact that the payment advice cases had not been followed through to their conclusion - was that the investigative apparatus is fragmented. The MVD, the Prosecutor’s Office and the State Anti-Narcotics Committee all had their investigations…Nobody united their efforts even when the situation required it.
      Because it was so convenient for some…It’s a separate topic, but the fact of the matter is that this circumstance also played a very negative role during the investigation of all the machinations with the false payment advices. After all, this was an unprecedented crime - the country was literally being plundered before the very eyes of the entire law enforcement system! One set of these cases involving the payment advices was investigated by Sergei Ivanovich Shumeyko, who had to gain access to executives of the Central Bank as part of the investigation in order to find out how one young lady who didn’t have any authorization was able to sign a document for billions of rubles. She can’t even be charged for negligence. It’s just nonsense! And as for Shumeyko, who investigated the entire case, I don’t know what he accomplished, I only know that afterward he got a job at the Central Bank. See?…And the payment advice case was never really investigated to any reasonable conclusion…
     And as for the Chernoy brothers, I remember how we singled out several incidents. For example, we had there a certain Ms. Boshyan associated with Mikhail Chernoy. Three billion rubles were moved through her under false documents, and she quickly moved to Israel, and our colleagues reported to us that she emigrated to Israel, but supposedly was not actually there. They can’t find her! She could become a very important witness…There were many such incidents…There were also other cases associated with other players, but it was in this case that I relied on Glushenkov’s experience.
-     What became of Glushenkov? After all, he quit the ministry? And, it seems, not only on his own volition, but was advised to do so?
-    Basically, yes. He had to quit, and I don’t know what became of him.
-   Did it have anything to do with the interview in which he talked about the lack of evidence against the Chernoy brothers?
No, we gave him, shall we say, a slap on the wrist for that interview. One cannot speak of the guilt or innocence of a person when he is under investigation and is effectively a suspect. But he was forced to leave for another reason. The situation was a bit different, and where he went later I don’t know.
-   Considering all of the false payment advice cases, was the damage to the country’s economy really enormous?
-      Yes, it was enormous! It was incomparable! I was so upset that sometimes I just wanted to say to hell with it and go to the taiga without looking back, in order not to see what has happening all around. After all, who is Chernoy? Just a swindler, a cheat…But the authorities of that time either ignored or helped to facilitate all of it. And examples of these are legion…Only lazy people didn’t steal, especially if they had connections at the top.
-     Did you experience pressure “from above” associated with this case, or in any other similar cases in which metallurgy was at the center of attention of the law enforcement agencies?
-     With regard to this case I don’t remember, but there was a strange practice in which, for example, an act of amnesty was applied to a large proven incident of theft, moreover, in advance, when the suspect had not even been charged with anything, which is legal nonsense. Or we tried to prove an act of theft and establish that the suspect embezzled state money, but we were told that it was necessary to figure out who sent the money under false payment orders! But the fact that a specific person embezzled the funds remained unseen…As the saying goes, it shouldn’t happen to a great power!
-     It turns out, Ivan Alexandrovich, that you knew who the, shall we say, beneficiary was in these cases associated with the false payment advices? And as a result of these crimes received tens and hundreds of millions…
-   Yes, of course. But when we raised the question about bringing the accused to justice, we were told to go figure out who directly prepared the false payment advice…But that was impossible! The criminals would send the documents to themselves via teletype, and there was an obvious collusion with bank employees, and the trail went cold. We, of course, conducted searches and such, but, as is customary under our laws, all doubts are in favor of the accused. This is why we can suppose or suspect something, but if there is any doubt, then the questions are decided in favor of the accused. And there were numerous situations when a person would talk and outside players would give me the document! And the question arises, did he know that the document was false? It’s very difficult to prove. In general, the crime was very well thought-out, and - this is my personal opinion - it was conceived in the depths of the Central Bank and carried out throughout the country. As soon as the first such cases appeared, the Central Bank should have immediately reacted and other structures should have gotten involved, but this was not done. Enormous damage was done to the country…
-    Don’t you find it frustrating? At the time, the necessary political will to put an end to these crimes, to root them out, was lacking, and now, fifteen years later, the situation has changed, and it would have been possible to do something, but it’s water under the bridge?
-    Of course it’s frustrating. It’s like they say, it shouldn’t have happened to a great power. What kind of country is it that allows itself to be plundered in this way by impostors! And now nobody will reconsider it. It’s all long forgotten, and perhaps missing from the archives. It’s a pity. If one were to look at these cases now and consider them thoroughly, one could find a lot of interesting things in all of these criminal strategems. Chains of fly-by-night companies registered under lost (or supposedly lost) passports, other contrivances…But it’s not how complex the investigation was, but rather how the respective departments reacted to its results. For example, as soon as the Central Bank learned about the scheme, they should have immediately contained it in order to prevent it from being used in the future. We spent years investigating these cases, and false payment advices continued to appear! And all of these giant amounts of money, hundreds of millions of rubles, were mostly sent abroad, where it impossible to find them. All of those offshore locations on the Isle of Man, the Cayman Islands, Cyprus…And whenever we sent orders there to provide legal assistance, it took a long time to fulfill them if they were fulfilled at all. And as I have already said, the peculiarities of our system were also a factor. For example, if Chernoy had, for example, stolen sunflower seeds from an elderly woman outside a metro station, he would have been questioned. He would have been caught. But with regard to the case of the false payment advices, it was impossible to question him, though attempts were made. But by that time he had left the country, and our international requests led nowhere. But, of course, omissions were made in the investigation. If there is no direct evidence of a person’s guilt, and we have said already that direct evidence was practically impossible to produce in that situation, then it would have been possible to bring a person to justice on the basis of indirect evidence. And in my opinion, there was enough indirect evidence to bring Chernoy to justice, but for some reason Sergei Glushenkov did not act accordingly…It’s like this: if you steal some sunflower seeds, you’ll go to prison. But if you steal billions, you’ll live in Israel on the seacoast.
          And I would like to add that, when investigating such complex and intricate cases, much depends on the organization of the investigative process. Consider this: companies that are involved in the case are scattered throughout the country. It is necessary to question people everywhere and find out under whose name the front companies were registered and question those who requested the sending of the false payment advices. That’s a lot of work throughout the country. With the benefit of hindsight, I can say that all of these cases could have been investigated successfully only if the entire state machine - the investigative agencies and financial institutions - had acted decisively and in concert. The way we acted in Tatarstan, in concert, and we achieved a result. And the criminal circles sensed this, so that attempts to commit fraud in the republic were nipped in the bud…But as a whole in the country, unfortunately there was no such concerted action. And the crimes continued. This must not be forgotten under any circumstances, if for nothing else than to prevent it from happening again.

Interviewer: Andrei Kalitin.