Monaco Has Begun Weeding Out Wealthy Russians From Its Banks

Usmanov's sister, a Transneft contractor, and the brother of the Russian Minister of Agriculture have been subject to sanctions.

Monaco has launched a large-scale audit of the principality’s largest banks and asset management firms in an effort to be removed from the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) gray list. The principality was placed on the list in June 2024 due to insufficient efforts to combat money laundering. The FATF acknowledged that Monaco may soon be removed from the gray list, as reported by Bloomberg reported.

The local financial regulator, AMSF, had been investigating UBS Monaco, Banque Havilland, Julius Baer, Guardian Management, and International Corporate Structuring (ICS) for several years. In 2025–2026, it began publishing the results of these audits, including client files where banks had failed to adequately verify the source of funds, criminal ties, suspicious transactions, and connections to sanctioned entities or political figures. About one-third of the problematic client files are linked to Russia. The AMSF withholds names but provides enough details—occupations, relatives, companies and industries, dates sanctions were imposed, and criminal investigations—to identify some of the clients.

Usmanov’s sister, a “Transneft” contractor, and the brother of the Minister of Agriculture

From March through June 2024, the AMSF audited UBS Monaco. In one of the files, the bank explained a client’s wealth as gifts from her brother, who had given her $70 million and several properties. As the regulator determined, UBS failed to collect documents confirming the origin of the donor’s own wealth. The woman worked as a gynecologist, and her brother had served time for a criminal offense; he was a major industrialist and turned out to have ties to an English soccer club. After sanctions were imposed on her brother, she also came under restrictions. The details clearly point to the sister of Alisher Usmanov—Saodat Narzieva. An OCCRP investigation previously identified Narzieva as the beneficial owner of 27 Credit Suisse accounts, with the highest balance in one of them exceeding $2 billion. UBS closed her account in March 2025.

In October, the AMSF audited Julius Baer Wealth Management Monaco. One of its clients is Viktor Fedotov, the former head of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. In 2021, the Pandora Papers revealed that Fedotov was a hidden co-owner of VNIIIST—a Transneft contractor that profited from the construction of the massive ESPO oil pipeline. In an internal Transneft report, VNIIIST was accused of siphoning off approximately $140 million. Through an offshore company linked to VNIIIST, Fedotov received at least $98 million, and a trust associated with him purchased a private Bombardier jet for $34 million, the Guardian reported. The bank did not report its suspicions regarding the client until June 2022—a year after grounds for suspicion first arose. The regulator deemed this delay unacceptable. As a result, Julius Baer terminated its relationship with Fedotov.

In November, the regulator’s investigation extended to the management company Guardian Management. One of its clients was Leonid Novitsky, the former first deputy general director of “Rosagroleasing” and brother of former Minister of Agriculture Elena Skrynnik. According to Interfax, as early as 2015, Swiss prosecutors were investigating a money laundering case involving Novitsky, his wife, and Skrynnik. The case was linked to the alleged embezzlement of more than 1 billion rubles from Rosagroleasing. The Guardian initially took Novitsky’s connection to Skrynnik into account but later downgraded the client’s risk rating. AMSF did not find the necessary analysis for such a decision in the file.

Another client was identified in materials from the corporate provider ICS. The owner of Fedcominvest , Alexei Fedorichev , traded in sulfur, fertilizers, and grain and held stakes in port terminals in Ukraine. In 2024, at Ukraine’s request, Italian authorities seized assets linked to Fedorychev worth 41 million euros, including real estate in Florence. In Ukraine, the businessman was suspected of corruption, fraud against a state-owned company, and money laundering. The alleged damages amount to more than $60 million. The regulator’s complaints against ICS concerned how the company handled negative information about a client.

Russian Railways Top Executives and Corrupt Officials

Monaco’s regulator took an interest in five more clients with Russian ties, but their names could not be identified. One of ICS’s clients was a Russian oligarch and former vice president of Russian Railways (RZD), who became a client of the company in 2018. ICS accepted him as a client and considered the name coincidence to be a coincidence, but the AMSF confirmed that he was from RZD. Another businessman—a politically exposed person of Russian-Ukrainian origin—also remained a client of ICS. His file contained allegations of corruption, fraud, and money laundering, and his assets in Monaco were frozen at the request of Ukrainian authorities.

In the case of Banque Havilland, the regulator took issue with the wife of the head of a publicly traded Russian electric power company. The bank attributed her wealth to her husband’s income but was unable to confirm the origin of the family’s capital. As a result, the AMSF called on the bank to close her account. Another Havilland client, a Russian citizen residing in the UAE, had business ties to a Russian oligarch whose assets were frozen after the start of the war in Ukraine. He conducted questionable transactions through a company in the British Virgin Islands. In January 2024, the company paid him 3 million euros in dividends, only to receive the money back as a loan just three days later. The bank was unable to explain the economic rationale behind such a transaction.

At UBS Monaco, the regulator identified a client who had made his fortune from Kuzbass coal, and one of his companies had been accused of fraud. Compliance warned that the client’s company had been added to the OFAC sanctions list. Despite this, UBS opened an account for him in Monaco in 2017.

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