Moscow sentences Promsvyazbank’s founders to eight years each — a sentence neither Ananyev brother will serve
Moscow’s Lefortovo District Court sentenced the former Promsvyazbank co-owners Alexei and Dmitry Ananyev to eight years in prison each, the Russian business outlet RBC said on August 18. Both men were tried in absentia.
On August 18, Moscow's Lefortovo District Court handed down an eight-year prison sentence to Alexei and Dmitry Ananyev, the former co-owners of Promsvyazbank, for embezzling over 39 billion rubles from the bank. The court found them guilty of systematically embezzling the bank's funds from 2012 to 2017, exploiting their control over Promsvyazbank and its lending policy. The brothers are also facing additional charges of abuse of office, misappropriation of funds, fraud, and money laundering.
Founded in 1995 by the Ananyev brothers, Promsvyazbank faced a bailout from Russia's Central Bank in December 2017. In the following years, Dmitry Ananyev fled to Cyprus, while Alexei remained in Russia, managing his share of the business until he too left the country. Criminal proceedings against the Ananyevs commenced in 2019, two years after the bailout.
Cypriot authorities later expressed that they were reviewing their decision to grant the brothers "golden passports," citizenship awarded in exchange for investment. Meduza, the news outlet reporting this story, is committed to transparency about its use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The article was written by one of their human journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model, with a final review by a Meduza editor before publication.
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