The Russian Federal Customs Service is suing BONY over an illegal wire transfer scheme from the 1990s, when two Russian émigrés — one of whom worked for BONY — moved $7.5 billion to American accounts from Russia via unlicensed wire transfers. They later pleaded guilty to various offenses under U.S. law. BONY, under a non-prosecution agreement with the DOJ, acknowledged failure to properly monitor wire transfer activity and paid a fine of $14 million. Now the Russians claim they, too, should be awarded a fine, to the tune of $22.5 billion (not a typo), and are basing their argument on the RICO statute.
Now Fortune’s Roger Parloff is reporting that that the Russian Federal Customs Service failed to send a representative to appear in a Moscow court for the resumption of pretrial hearings. Damien Marshall, a Boies Schiller & Flexner partner who’s repping BONY along with Jonathan Schiller, told Parloff that Judge Lyodmila Pulova said the customs service had faxed her a petition requesting a delay until Oct. 15, and explaining only that the the service’s lawyers were busy with other matters.
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