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The story about PNB and BIB continues to receive very odd coverage in the press and in blogs.
Of course, the story about PNB, Ashurkov, and the company that owned a house in suburban London has been public at least since 2021.
Let me remind you: the first report about Vladimir Ashurkov and “Calleri Ltd” (registered on the Isle of Man), which owned a house in Weybridge and sat on the balance sheet of “PNB Banka” shortly (as of March 31, 2019) before its bankruptcy in August 2019, appeared on September 26, 2021, in a report by Latvian state TV. Long before current events and the Nezvlin correspondence with the wrongdoers.
There’s both a video report and a text version on the website:
LSM is state media.
Translation of the relevant excerpt:
The bank also sold its subsidiary “Calleri Limited,” which owned a luxury mansion in suburban London, without requiring immediate payment. The estimated value of the house is around €10 million. The buyer is listed as Vladimir Ashurkov, living in London, who is likely the executive director of the Anti‑Corruption Foundation founded by Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny.
“This property was in effect released under the terms of the deal with a promise of payment, without any security,” said the administrator Krastiņš.
Krastiņš is an official; he heads the bank’s asset administration working to recover creditors’ funds:
On September 12th 2019 Vigo was approved as the administrator of the insolvent AS “PNB banka.”
Additional information for those interested
2018 financial statements of “PNB Banka”—the relevant item is on page 134.
In 2019, “PNB Banka” was owned by Grigory Guselnikov (84% stake; the quarterly report, page 9). In that report, “Calleri Ltd” appears on page 11. So as of March 31, 2019, the company was still on the bank’s balance sheet.
The house owned by this company is “Hill House” on Warreners Lane in Weybridge. A 2015 sale attempt is listed on a property site.
The land registry extract notes that the house was sold by “Calleri Ltd” on February 18, 2020—after PNB’s bankruptcy—with “Calleri Ltd” as the seller.
About PNB and the analysis of Delfi articles that came out the day after FBK published screenshots: I wrote here. Note that Lev Kadik (Delfi) slightly corrected the piece about the house after our comments, fixing factual errors. Kudos to Lev for that.
There were many other oddities in this story and especially in how it was covered—see Twitter, it was widely discussed.
More on why it’s hard to draw definite conclusions:
I don’t know what exactly happened in this case, but public information doesn’t imply either clear “guilt” or “innocence” of the people involved, if we trust Krastiņš’s comments (in fact, the only publicly available authoritative source).
Let me explain why everything looks extremely ambiguous.
Imagine you’re the owner of a failing bank. The local regulator has handed supervisory powers over your bank to the European Central Bank, which is scrutinizing your reports. You also know that the bank’s assets are partially siphoned, partially overstated (there are lawsuits about potentially stripped PNB assets—interesting reading). Now you want to extract as many assets as possible before a direct intervention begins.
How to remove an asset from the balance? Sell it on installments to a front company that will pass the asset to a third party and fail to pay. What can you get from a front company?
But that’s quite hard to do. First, every new counterparty must be onboarded—full KYC, UBOs, source of funds. Second, before issuing a credit line the bank must build a credit file and analyze solvency. KYC and balance‑sheet assets (in installment sales, the buyer’s obligation becomes the bank’s asset) must be reported to the regulator; you can’t just slip in a shady firm.
So imagine this instead: a creditworthy person or entity with a clear source of wealth buys the asset on installments. Such a counterparty won’t trip internal controls or KYC, nor bother the regulator. And the reporting will show risk to a “clean” client.
Now put in the sales contract (or an addendum) an option to assign the asset and the payment obligations to a third party—say, that very front company. It’s much easier not to disclose an assignment option in the contract and the reporting than to push a front company through controls or carry risk on it. Recovering from a front company after the option is exercised is hard—the borrower may simply have no assets.
That gives us a well‑known pre‑bankruptcy asset‑stripping scheme.
We can see how such options work in the DMBL/Vermenda example in the Probusinessbank story—there, too, was an undisclosed assignment option, and Vermenda couldn’t have received a bank loan directly (unlike DMBL).
Did that happen here or not? We don’t know. Current public info doesn’t allow a definite answer. We’d need to see the sales‑contract terms and the contract’s subsequent fate. Until then, categorical statements either way are unjustified given what’s public.
More on this story, the odd talking points, and what questions journalists should be asking Ashurkov to dispel suspicion about removing assets from “PNB Banka”:
Formally, Ashurkov could appear as the borrower with whom the bank could sign an installment sales contract for “Calleri Ltd” without tripping internal controls or the regulator. Former financier, clear source of wealth, public figure, etc.
If the goal is asset stripping, routing via related parties or shady entities is hard. You need a realistic story with a quality borrower.
The next question is whether the contract contained assignment options to third parties. If yes, and rights (including payment obligations) were assigned—possibly to parties linked to bank shareholders—that’s a classic textbook pre‑bankruptcy asset‑stripping scheme.
Whether Ashurkov ultimately bought the company is irrelevant—what matters is whether he was used as the initial “clean” face to get the company off the bank’s balance.
Who eventually bought the house also doesn’t matter—what matters is where the cash from the sale of “Calleri Ltd” went (a liquidation request for the company was filed in July 2020, per the Isle of Man register).
Price also doesn’t matter—obviously, whoever controlled the company at the time was rushing to convert the house to cash. That would be true in both scenarios: a stripping scheme or, alternatively, bank‑controlled administration trying to return money to creditors.
If the aim is to conclusively exclude Ashurkov’s role in stripping assets from “PNB Banka” before bankruptcy, one must obtain his comments on the structure of the signed contract and whether the company returned to the bank’s balance when the deal “fell through.” No journalist or “investigator” is asking this, and it’s unclear why.