The newspaper Vedomosti quoted a Zurich court, which was ruling on a commercial dispute, as saying Telecommunications Minister Leonid Reiman had allegedly organised “illegal transactions.”
Using money thus obtained, an investment fund called IPOC registered in the Bahamas, “of which the minister is sole beneficiary, attempted to pay for shares in Megafon (Russia’s third largest mobile phone company,)” the report said.
Reiman last December denied allegations of wrongdoing after The Wall Street Journal said he was implicated in an international probe into the laundering of money taken from state-owned telecom companies in the Saint Petersburg region.
The minister was accused of overseeing the issuing of new shares — thus “diluting” the existing stock — and then concealing some of the funds raised via a network of shell companies.
An extract from the Zurich court ruling seen by AFP stated that “Witness No. 7 (Reiman) guided, supervised and acted as an organiser of the dilution (of shares) constituting a misappropriation and thus a criminal offence.”
The Wall Street Journal last year quoted letters from prosecutors in Germany sent to other Western countries as saying Reiman had “set up a network of shell companies and trusts to secure and conceal more than one billion dollars in assets.”
The American newspaper said President Vladimir Putin had worked closely with Reiman for more than a decade, from the days when Putin was deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg and Reiman was an executive of a state telecom company there.
Some of the transactions under investigation date from around that time, the report said.
Reiman has repeatedly denied the allegations, saying he has never held shares in Russian telecommunications companies apart from a few in the regional Severo-Zapad Telekom. He also denied any links with IPOC.
Source: www.caribbeannetnews.com
