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PARIS (Reuters) – The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into “aggravated money laundering” linked to hundreds of millions of euros and dollars in suspicious flows from the Cypriot brokerage company TCR International Limited, which had a branch of BNP Paribas, BNP Paribas Securities Services, reports Le Monde on Tuesday.
According to the daily, this investigation concerns fund transfers made between 2019 and 2021 and is the consequence of a request for assistance from the American authorities who are interested in the financial circuits used by the Russian paramilitary group Wagner and its former leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in August in the crash of his plane in Russia two months after a 24-hour mutiny against Russian military leaders.
The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed to Reuters the opening of an investigation following a report from Tracfin, the financial intelligence service of the Ministry of the Economy, last May “denouncing suspicious flows from the company TCR International Limited “.
“Over the period from 2019 to 2021, several hundred million euros and dollars would have circulated in his cash accounts in France, corresponding to funds of possibly dubious origin and/or flows without explicit economic logic” , declares the prosecution, which does not mention BNP Paribas.
The prosecution also did not comment on a possible link between Yevgeni Prigozhin and the transfers of funds carried out by TCR.
According to Le Monde, BNP Paribas Securities Services provided “securities custody” services to TCR from January 2019 to January 2022 and it was at its initiative that this agreement was terminated.
Questioned about this investigation, the French bank said it could not “comment in view of the obligations to which it is bound”. It added that it was “committed to meeting its regulatory obligations” and had adopted a global compliance system to comply with laws, rules and regulations.
TCR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The offense of aggravated money laundering is punishable in France by a sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of 750,000 euros or half the value of the laundered property.
(Written by Richard Lough, French version Bertrand Boucey)
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