Russian Bank Mired in Controversy By GREG MYRE MOSCOW (AP) -- In a murky saga, Russia's Central Bank secretly routed billions of dollars through a British offshore account for several years and never bothered to tell anyone. The mystery surrounding the Central Bank's handling of Russia's scarce currency reserves is still unfolding, and no wrongdoing has been proven since the country's top prosecutor made the bombshell revelation a month ago, then vanished from public life. At a minimum, the episode is a major embarrassment for a government that has been accused of widespread corruption for years and is desperately seeking billions of dollars in foreign loans to pull the economy out of recession. The Central Bank has insisted there was no wrongdoing and all the money was returned -- ``with interest, and to the last kopeck,'' the Central Bank's Deputy Chairman Oleg Mozhaiskov said recently, without providing figures. However, one parliament member, Nikolai Gonchar, has gone as far as to accuse top Central Bank officials of siphoning off investment profits from the offshore account. ``Russia created a system under which the high-ranking financial elite of the country received personal income by making the country indebted,'' Gonchar told a news conference last week. The Central Bank's terse explanations -- and a lack of details about how much money or interest was involved -- have raised more questions than they answered. More importantly, the country is unlikely to get loans from the International Monetary Fund or foreign banks until the clouds clear. According to the Central Bank, it shipped money from 1993-97 to the small, obscure Financial Management Co., or FIMACO, based in Britain's Channel Islands but effectively under Central Bank control. It says it channeled the money through FIMACO -- and kept it secret -- because it feared Russia could default on debts and international creditors would be looking to seize the country's assets. Central Bank officials insist there was never more than $1.4 billion in the account at any one time, and that FIMACO received just $1.7 million for managing the money for several years, a sum well below usual market rates. The operation was analogous to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan sending large sums of the U.S. Treasury's money to a secret account on a Caribbean island, and afterward providing no explanation about the size of the investment profits -- or where they went. Russia's foreign reserves currently stand at $11.5 billion, a small sum for a country of Russia's size, and not enough to handle large foreign debts that are falling due this year. Central Bank Chairman Viktor Gerashchenko has not spoken out on the controversy and the statements by his deputies strike many as incomplete at best. The Central Bank's secret account was so well hidden that even the most senior Russian government officials were not told about it. ``I had heard about irregularities in the Central Bank, but no information was given to the government,'' said Yegor Gaidar, who briefly served as prime minister in 1992, when the FIMACO account was open, though not yet in active use. Gaidar, a free-market liberal who is now a harsh government critic, said the Central Bank operation may have been perfectly legal. But, he added, ``it was strange. A serious investigation is needed.'' Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov made the FIMACO operation public a month ago in a letter to parliament, alleging that a total of $50 billion passed through the account before it was closed two years ago. Skuratov resigned a day after his announcement, citing heart problems, and has vanished from public view. Details have been trickling out slowly, and the Russian media and public, perhaps inured after years of scandals and corruption allegations, seems little moved. Still, Gonchar, the parliament member, has pressed ahead and claimed Friday he had evidence of wrongdoing. He said FIMACO invested $143 million in Russian government treasury bills in 1996 when interest rates were sky-high. The investment earned a return of $38.9 million. But Gonchar said he can find no information showing the profit was returned to government coffers, and believes it was stolen. ``The Central Bank issued a special regulation that allowed it not to show these amounts on its balance sheets. They were recorded on special accounts'' that have not been made public, he said. Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov has vowed to crack down on endemic corruption that has bedeviled Russia's attempts to develop a working market economy. Yet he has not signaled any plans to investigate the Central Bank. ``If the government has really started a war on corruption, it should have looked first of all at itself,'' said Grigory Yavlinsky, a leading liberal member of parliament. ``It always looks somewhere on the periphery, far from itself.''
