Hogan Lovells, alongside Cyprus-based Scordis, Papapetrou & Co, has successfully represented National Bank Trust in an embezzlement case against Dmitry and Alexei Ananyev and their respective wives, Lyudmila and Daria Ananyev, before Cypriot courts.
According to Hogan Lovells, “National Bank Trust successfully served a claim of approximately EUR 315 million on the Ananyevs and their wives in Cyprus and Austria. The brothers are the former owners and beneficiaries of the Russian banks Promsvyazbank PJSC and Avtovazbank JSC. National Bank Trust claims that the Ananyevs embezzled funds from these banks for their own personal gain; this second claim brings the total amount now claimed by National Bank Trust in the Cyprus courts to approximately EUR 586 million.”
According to the firm, the National Bank Trust “alleges that over a series of years the Ananyev brothers implemented fraudulent schemes by issuing unsecured (or materially undersecured) loans to shell company borrowers that were related to the Ananyevs and/or secretly owned and controlled by them. As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars were siphoned off from Promsvyazbank leaving a black hole in its loan books. The bad loans were ultimately transferred to National Bank Trust in 2019 after Promsvyazbank collapsed and went into administration. Separate criminal proceedings in Russia are pending against Dmitry and Alexei Ananyev in relation to various alleged counts of misappropriation of assets related to Promsvyazbank.”
“We continue to identify new episodes of the embezzlement of funds in the case of the Ananyev brothers,” said Alexander Sokolov, President and Chairman of the Management Board of National Bank Trust. “Our task is to get to the bottom of all circumstances of what happened and recover the siphoned off assets. This new claim is in addition to the claim already filed by the bank in Cyprus against the Ananyev brothers and their wives for EUR 271 million.”
Hogan Lovells’ team was led by Partners Alexei Dudko and Alex Sciannaca and included, among others, Counsel Denis Almakaev.
