Yurov Ilya Sergeyevich

Yurov Ilya Sergeyevich

Biography

2012-2018

Detention in the case of financial fraud and the withdrawal of assets offshore from the credit institution Trust

In 2015, law enforcement agencies suspected Ilya Yurov and the management of Trust Bank of financial fraud and taking assets offshore. The reason for this was the reorganization of the bank in 2014, during which signs of money laundering were found through borrower lending schemes. The central bank appealed to law enforcement agencies. The check has begun. The ex-banker who had left the Russian Federation by this time was put on the international wanted list.

He was detained twice: in 2016 in Ukraine and in 2018 in the UK. However, the Prosecutor General's Office of Russia was denied extradition.

Yurov was charged with three episodes of particularly large embezzlement in 2012-2014. According to the investigation, at first the accused and his accomplices - the beneficiaries of two fictitious Cypriot companies - issued a loan for 9 billion rubles for imaginary investment projects. In the end, no one returned the money. Then the attackers brought 61.5 million Eurobonds bought with Trust money to another Cypriot company. As a result, another 1.4 billion rubles leaked from the bank.

The last episode is associated with the withdrawal of more than 11 million Eurobonds, again acquired at the expense of the Trust, to an offshore company registered in Bermuda and controlled by the participants in the fraud. In this case, the damage, according to the investigation, exceeded 3.2 billion rubles. As a result of these actions, the credit institution did not receive income, but eventually ended up in a financial crisis.

2022

Sentence - 8 years in prison for embezzlement from a credit institution Trust more than 1.5 billion

In mid-April 2022, the Basmanny District Court of Moscow sentenced Ilya Yurov to 8 years in prison. The former co-owner of Trust Bank was found guilty of embezzling more than 1.5 billion rubles and almost $168 million from a credit institution.

By mid-April 2022, Yurov is on the international wanted list, so the ex-banker was convicted in absentia. Two other ex-co-owners of the bank Nikolai Fetisov and Sergei Belyaev are also hiding abroad.^[1]

Recovery of 9 billion rubles for embezzlement from a credit institution Trust more than 1.5 billion

The Trust recovered from the former owners of the bank non-core assets Ilya Yurov, Sergei Belyaev and Nikolai Fetisov a total of 9 billion rubles (about $142.4 million) two years after the court won against them (then the court decided to pay the bank $900 million). This was announced to Vedomosti in mid-December 2022 by the chairman of the bank's board, Alexander Sokolov.

According to his owls, the rest of the seized property of bankers awaits its turn to recover. But the process of returning funds is not fast: abroad is also a difficult economic situation and high inflation, so there are not many people who want to buy assets, Sokolov explained.

"Trust" recovered 9 billion rubles from its former owners

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The likelihood that Trust Bank will find the full amount of the decision is very low, Dmitry Chernenko, partner of the A1 Bar Association, told the newspaper. The defendants are unlikely to have assets for such an amount, he believes. In addition, most of them have been restructured and it will be difficult to recover them. The bank will return as much as it finds, Chernenko notes: usually it is from tens to a couple of hundred million dollars.

If debtors do not have enough funds or assets to pay the claim, then no interim measures, coercion and even bankruptcy will help to return debts in full, agrees Yuri Fedyukin, managing partner of Enterprise Legal Solutions. Some of the debt will simply be written off, he said.

The timing of the return is highly dependent on jurisdiction, says Chernenko: in England, it will be quite easy and fast to recover assets, but in jurisdictions such as Switzerland, France, Italy, processes can last for years. In addition, all opponents can use sanctions rhetoric in their favor and further delay the procedure, he added in a conversation with Vedomosti^[2]

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