The ex-owner of BBB bank is on trial in the Yaroslavl region.
The Prosecutor General’s Office has approved the indictment in the criminal case on embezzlement of about 2 billion rubles from the bankrupt Sevastopol bank BBB. After that, a case of laundering of part of the stolen money was initiated against two of its defendants, including the actual owner of the credit institution Angela Sergeeva. The results of the investigation will be considered in the Rybinsk City Court.
The Prosecutor General’s Office approved the indictment in the case of especially large embezzlement (part 4 of article 160 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) only at the second attempt. In the fall of 2023, the supervision refused to do so, among other things, because the investigation did not assess the testimony of witnesses and other defendants that all fictitious loans were issued on the instructions of the actual owner of BBB, Angela Sergeeva. Meanwhile, according to Kommersant, the latter, at first, even claimed the role of a victim in this case, who was allegedly deceived by the top management, but in the end remained in the status of a witness.
It took almost a year and a half for the additional investigation of the State Investigation Committee of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation. At the same time, BBB beneficiary Angela Sergeyeva was among the accused at the very beginning of the renewed investigation.
As Kommersant has already reported, employees of the State Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation and the Main Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs detained her on September 27, 2023 in the cottage village Europe-1 near Moscow, where the woman lived. At the request of the investigation, the 54-year-old ex-financier was sent to a pre-trial detention center by the Basmanny court of the capital. In addition to Mrs. Sergeeva, the accused in embezzlement of about 2 billion rubles are Irina Faminskaya, former vice-president and head of the credit committee of BBB, Anna Glebina, ex-advisor to the president and manager of the Moskovsky office of the Rybinsk branch of BBB, and Svetlana Demina, who replaced her in her last position. Their fourth alleged accomplice, Stanislav Gladkov, a specialist of the pledge department, died during the preliminary investigation and his criminal prosecution was terminated. The main case will be considered by the city court of Rybinsk (Yaroslavl region).
The investigation into the circumstances of the disappearance of money from the BBB by the State Investigation Committee of the Investigative Committee began in March 2019, after the Deposit Insurance Agency appealed to law enforcement authorities. According to the investigation, the accomplices withdrew funds from the bank, whose main clients were individuals, from July 2017 to February 2018, issuing loans to controlled one-day firms registered to fake CEOs.
Recall that the credit institution, formerly based in Yaroslavl, but in 2015 moved to Sevastopol, lost its license in April 2018.
According to the regulator, the bank, quite quickly becoming one of the key credit institutions of the peninsula, acquired not only a very impressive clientele, but also a significant amount of problem assets and property accounted for at an inflated value. “Taking into account the importance of the bank for the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol”, a temporary administration was introduced in the bank and a three-month moratorium on the satisfaction of creditors’ claims was imposed on it. The bank was looking for bailouts, but after the audit it became clear that the situation in the bank was catastrophic. Thus, the bank’s management refused to hand over to the administration credit files for 1.2 billion rubles, and the bank revealed large-scale asset withdrawal operations shortly before the collapse. As a result, its debt to creditors amounted to more than 12.3 billion rubles.
It should be noted that, including with the help of lawyer Irina Shoch, who represented the interests of the injured party in this case, the investigation managed to collect evidence of the involvement of the accused not only in embezzlement, but also in legalization (paragraphs “a” and “b” of part 4 of article 174.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) of the funds stolen from the Crimean bank. According to Kommersant, charges of laundering more than 30 million rubles. March 12, 2025 were brought against Angela Sergeeva and Irina Faminskaya. For this amount, dozens of LLCs and IEs allegedly managed to provide various types of services and supplied all sorts of goods to the firms under their control.
As Kommersant has already reported, Angela Sergeeva was introduced into financial circles in the early 2000s by Alexei Frenkel, former pre-manager of VIP Bank, with whom she studied together at the economics faculty of Moscow State University.
After the Moscow City Court in 2008 recognized Mr. Frenkel as the customer of the murder of the first deputy chairman of the Central Bank Andrei Kozlov and sentenced him to 19 years in prison, his protégé started active independent activity. However, in all her projects she acted, as a rule, through trusted persons. One of her first business partners is Oleg Vlasov, the owner of the Baltika Bank, who in February 2023 was sentenced to 17 years in a strict regime colony for withdrawing 46 billion rubles from Russia under the so-called Moldovan scheme.
At the same time, some witnesses claim that the bank was actually controlled not by Mr. Vlasov, but by Angela Sergeeva.
Subsequently, her paths crossed with almost all significant players in the shadow banking sector. In particular, among her closest business partners, Kommersant’s sources name Dmitry Rubinov, the former deputy head of the Central Bank’s Banking Regulation and Supervision Department, who was the beneficiary of a number of failed commercial banks from which tens of billions of rubles were withdrawn, and Yuri Glotzer, the former owner of the BFG-Credit bank, who now lives in Germany.
In addition, Angela Sergeeva allegedly “had close business relations” with Sergei Magin, one of Russia’s biggest money launderers, until the latter’s arrest in 2013. In late 2016, the Presnensky District Court of Moscow accused him of illegally cashing 122 billion rubles and sentenced him to eight and a half years in prison. Sergei Magin was released on parole in March 2023, after which he was arrested in absentia, this time for participation in the Landromat.