President of Metropol Bank Aidar Kotyuzhansky arrested in absentia in Moscow in the case of embezzlement of 400 million rubles
The Basmanny District Court of Moscow has arrested in absentia the president of the Metropol Bank, Aidar Kotyuzhansky. He is accused of embezzling 400 million of a bank controlled by him. It is assumed that the crime was committed between 2015 and 2016. Then the chairman of the board of the Metropol bank was Denis Dolotov. The investigation believes that he is also involved in the theft of funds.
The criminal case against Kotyuzhansky and Dolotov was initiated in 2020. However, for a long time, both appeared in it only as witnesses. Kotyuzhansky was charged in absentia in November 2022. At the same time, Dolotov was placed in custody, whose lawyer insists that he was not involved in illegal activities.
They didn’t even try to save the Metropol
According to investigators, Denis Dolotov issued several loans to companies that were not going to return the money. But Dolotov himself claims that everything was perfectly legal. Allegedly, firms made payments, but stopped doing so after his dismissal. Thus, he does not feel that he should bear any responsibility for this. Aidar Kotyuzhansky denies that he instructed Dolotov to issue loans to selected firms. Aidar Kotyuzhansky left Russia in 2016. He now lives in France. He explains his departure from the country by the fact that once he was assassinated.
In 2015, he sold Metropol Bank to the Bryansk businessman Vyacheslav Pakhomov, who transferred the asset to Konstantin Kornienko. The latter, the day before the revocation of the license from Metropol, took out 21 million rubles from the bank. For this he was sent to a colony for 7 years.
In September 2022, the Moscow Arbitration Court brought two co-owners of Metropol Bank and four former top managers of the organization to subsidiary liability. So, Andrei Faminsky will have to pay losses in the amount of 466 million rubles, Sergei Ryzhkov – more than 214 million, Igor Koldyshkin – more than 195 million rubles, and Ruslan Torikhoev – 119 million. Metropol Bank has been active in the market since 1991. However, his situation worsened so much that the Central Bank took away the license from the organization. At the beginning of August 2022, the bank had debts to 147 creditors in the amount of more than 2 billion rubles.
