Public discussions about the PBB case continue (for instance, today’s stream with Kortik), so it’s worth recapping several key points:

  1. The topic of asset stripping from Probusinessbank has been known for more than nine years and is understood unambiguously by people connected to the financial sector. Among professionals there is no disagreement about this story.

  2. For “official” media materials, I recommend the article in The Bell — it has a few technical shortcomings, but factually it’s the best published piece.

  3. If you want to examine the evidence yourself, the investigation site by Maxim Katz hosts the full primary documentation and relevant correspondence for the three core asset‑stripping schemes — via DMBL, OCIL, and BCS Cyprus — into the offshores Vermenda, Ambika, and Merrianol, controlled by the bank’s shareholders.

If anyone has questions about the documents and various technical aspects — for example, why these schemes violated Russian law, how Events of Default worked in the broker agreements, what falls under Article 160 part 4 (“theft committed by an organized group or on an especially large scale”), etc. — I’m happy to break this down again.

If you’re interested in additional asset‑stripping schemes not included in Katz’s materials, The Insider, etc. — here I wrote about siphoning assets from Probusinessbank to Larienta via Mediobanca:

And here — to Lankora via Falcon Private Bank

Larienta and Lankora were offshores controlled by Probusinessbank’s shareholders. Tens of millions of dollars were siphoned via these schemes as well but were not included in the published investigations.

If there’s interest, I can also discuss other schemes, for example through Russian companies, like OOO “Vega,” a.k.a. the “collection agency.”

Beyond poring over documentation, there’s also a very simple way to show people far from the finance industry that assets were stolen. When the provisional administration was introduced, it turned out that USD 470 million of high‑quality assets, reported as present on the bank’s balance sheet, in fact did not exist, and had to be written down to zero after the license was revoked. With the bank’s capital at USD 200 million, that immediately created a USD 270 million hole from just the three main transactions with DMBL, OCIL, and BCS Cyprus.

In this light, it’s irrelevant what “came into” and “went out of” the bank before then, or the posting of already stolen funds afterwards; if in reality the statements were fabricated and the bank simply didn’t have enough assets to cover its liabilities and pay creditors, that’s the crux of the matter.