Ashurkov’s lies in Dud interview: PNB Banka

I was deeply struck by the sheer amount of outright deceit and hypocrisy in this short fragment of Ashurkov’s interview with Dud. I haven’t seen this concentration of lies since Volkov’s statements about the Zheleznyak affair.

Let me go through it in detail, with links to public sources.

First, the house Ashurkov claimed he intended to buy as an investment did not belong to Guselnikov. Calleri Limited was an asset on PNB Banka’s balance sheet with a book value of €10.845 million, as stated in its financial reports, and as such secured the bank’s obligations to its depositors. So Ashurkov signed a preliminary agreement not to «buy Guselnikov’s house that he owned» but to buy «Calleri Limited from PNB Banka» — one month before the bank’s bankruptcy. On installments — meaning if the agreement had been fulfilled, the company would have left the bank’s balance sheet in exchange for Ashurkov’s promise to pay sometime in the future, leaving the bank (and indirectly its depositors) with a promissory note instead of a real asset.

Second, Guselnikov did not «refuse to sell the house.» A few days (!) after the preliminary agreement was signed, the obligations under it were assigned to one of the bank’s new «shareholders» with a very questionable history (not approved by the ECB — you can read about Roger Tamraz and his accomplices), Said Mehraik, who then definitively removed the assets from the balance sheet without paying the bank. This was reported by public television on October 7, 2024.

Why was the preliminary agreement needed in this story? Recall that the bank had serious problems with asset quality and was under ECB supervision since April 2019. Suspicious transactions were clearly being monitored.

My assumption: the bank could not directly approve a sale agreement — where a property-owning company is exchanged for a natural person’s obligation — with someone who would raise regulatory red flags. It would fail credit control (and possibly KYC): the bank would be replacing a company with a real house on its books with a person’s promise to pay, so that person needed to be creditworthy. Said Mehraik would have raised too many questions. Ashurkov, however, would not (a creditworthy person with a clear source of wealth, formally unconnected to the shareholders) and could plausibly pass internal approval procedures.

A deal with someone who passes internal controls, with a subsequent assignment to a third party — is a rather brazen but sometimes workable asset-stripping scheme in conditions where a bank is near bankruptcy and the priority is to extract assets and run, despite the risk of the suspicious transactions being reversed.

Now moving to something more serious.

Third, news of Ashurkov’s involvement in the house purchase scheme first appeared in a report by Latvian public television on September 26, 2021, where the administrator of the bankrupt bank, Vigo Krastiņš, confirmed Ashurkov’s participation.

In 2022, Latvian law enforcement sent a mutual legal assistance request to the United Kingdom. The UK authorities found the request justified, and as a result, Ashurkov was interrogated in London.

Ashurkov’s attempt to portray this interrogation as somehow related to Nezvlin’s correspondence with Blinov — which took place in 2023 — contradicts not only common sense but the basic chronology of events. When the scandal began to be discussed, the Blinov-Nezvlin correspondence simply did not exist. His «surprise» at the interrogation is even less credible — the story involving his name had been public in the media since 2021. And the Nezvlin correspondence screenshots featured a completely different bankrupt Latvian bank — BIB.

This strategy of deceiving a public unfamiliar with what happened in the Latvian banking sector is not new. FBK and Insider had already tried to link the reasons for Ashurkov’s London interrogation in the PNB Banka asset-stripping investigation to Nezvlin’s correspondence screenshots. After we pointed out the discrepancy between FBK and Insider’s claims and reality — and the difference in bank names — the screenshots were removed from Insider’s article (as it later turned out, «at FBK’s request»), while the conclusions remained. Dobrokhotov said they «didn’t bother checking which bank it was, and that it doesn’t matter anyway.»

This fragment of the interview very clearly and unambiguously characterizes both Ashurkov and those who tried to maintain his legend, openly deceiving the public on the pages of Russian «opposition» media. After the story of publications about the allegedly existing «Ledorub» project to «discredit Zheleznyak,» there is nothing left to be surprised about.