Kremlin-backed forgery scheme moved $6.9bn through global banks
FT finds thousands of Russian payments received by Standard Chartered, Citigroup and other international groups in vast leak from inside fintech A7
Standard Chartered, Citigroup and other international banks have handled billions of dollars from a Kremlin-backed fintech company that tricked its way into the global financial system with a vast document forgery operation.
Hundreds of thousands of files obtained by the FT from inside A7, a group set up as an alternative to the western payments system, reveal how it used old-fashioned money laundering to funnel more than $6.9bn through the international banking system despite sanctions on Russia.
Some payments in the leak related to extremely sensitive war-related goods, including military equipment and purchases by Russia’s security services.
While A7 has trumpeted its financial innovations, it depended on a network of front companies and existing businesses to access the Swift system to make payments. It obscured the use of these agents with an industrial-scale forgery operation to produce counterfeit invoices.
Accounts held at Standard Chartered in Hong Kong alone received $1.1bn from A7-linked entities between late 2024, when A7 was established, and August 2025. Over the same period, DBS in Hong Kong was sent $273mn and Citigroup clients received $74mn.
Clients of Deutsche Bank in Europe were sent about $18mn.
A7 opened accounts at First Abu Dhabi, the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, for 17 different entities, which made more than $1.8bn of outbound payments. It also opened accounts at JPMorgan Chase and DBS.
A7 was originally set up in Russia and Kyrgyzstan by Ilan Shor, a Moldovan oligarch, with support from Promsvyazbank (PSB), a state-owned bank with close links to the defence industry.
Shor told the Russian state news agency Tass in July: “We give companies and countries freedom, because our system is immune to sanctions.”
The Kremlin has touted A7 as the country’s flagship provider of cross-border payments for imports since Russian banks were cut off from the Swift system after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, this month discussed a “Russian-Indian payment system” with the chair of PSB.
The FT found evidence of 100 A7 front companies making payments during the period covered by the leak. The documents mention at least a further 100 such groups, including at least 61 in the UAE, 87 in Hong Kong, 16 in Kyrgyzstan and 14 in Indonesia.
While most of the biggest fronts were shells controlled by A7, the biggest single paying entity was a now-closed Kyrgyz state body, the Trading Company of the Kyrgyz Republic.
At least three entities were based in the UK, where A7 was placed under sanctions in May 2025. One entity in Hungary appears to have been the critical conduit for payments into the EU.
Under the A7 scheme, front companies arrange for cash to be deposited at banks within the Swift system, which can then be used to settle bills abroad for Russian companies. Chinese bank accounts were the final destination for just over half of the flows.
Zach Tvarozna, a former US government banking analyst who wrote a report about A7 published by the Open Source Centre based on a previous leak from the company, said “the new data here really shows that the true scale of A7’s money-laundering network is much bigger than anyone had previously realised”.
He added that the material “should make us think again about how hard it is to keep traditional correspondent banking clean”.
A7 is now a major payment provider for conventional civilian businesses, with the company claiming it handles nearly a fifth of Russia’s foreign exchange transactions.
A7 put considerable effort into cheating anti-money laundering checks by banks. The front companies would produce documents, forged in advance, that created a paper trail designed to obfuscate real transactions.
This included a library of thousands of corporate stamps, some of which are fakes while others have been harvested from real documents from unknowing companies.
The front companies were given instructions on how to portray the types of goods they were buying so as not to raise alarms. For instance, employees were told to replace customs codes for goods under sanctions with the closest possible alternatives that were not subject to sanctions.
They also worked hard to maintain plausible cover stories for the buyers and sellers.
In one internal chat, staff at A7 discuss a bank compliance query about a payment that in truth was for 500 night-vision scopes, costing Rmb3.6mn ($510,000), on behalf of a Russian client in February 2025.
“The client’s invoice was for a Thermal Scope-HR50L,” one staff member notes.
A7 staff had already produced forged paperwork claiming that the client was buying toughened glass, but they considered instead producing invoices listing the goods as footwear.
However, staff members raised concerns that the paperwork should remain consistent with previous invoices.
“This beneficiary already had payments described as cameras/optical goods — won’t shoes raise questions?” one staff member asks. “Fine then, leave it as glass,” another replies.
A7 staff also discuss how to remove what they call “Russian trace” from documents. In addition to changing the quoted buyers, the products and the delivery details for goods, they had strategies and software to ensure that suspicions were not raised by Cyrillic alphabet letters appearing in any documents.
But Solara Rise is an A7 front organisation, which exists to disguise the source of funds and the eventual buyer of the goods.
The fintech company exploits controls in Swift that depend on the sending bank performing adequate checks on customers. Beating the controls of any member bank clears the way for A7 to send payments through the system.
In the early stages of its scheme in late 2024 and early 2025, A7 sent large volumes through three Kyrgyz banks: Eldik, Aiyl and Eurasian Savings Bank (ESB).
A7’s records show that suspicions were raised by Standard Chartered, which has no direct correspondent relationship with these Kyrgyz banks, in February 2025. A7 recipients at the bank had their accounts closed shortly afterwards.
A7 then shifted its operations by routing more payments through the UAE.
First Abu Dhabi handled the bulk of flows. A7 front companies opened more than a dozen accounts at the bank, from which they made $1.3bn of outgoing payments and about $500mn of transactions with one another.
The bank also played a crucial role for A7 by facilitating conversions of Emirati dirhams, via its correspondents, into dollars, euros and renminbi — a vital service to enable cross-border settlement.
At least one A7 entity also opened an account at the Hong Kong branch of DBS, the Singaporean bank. A7 records show this entity receiving payments of $60mn and making payments totalling $207mn, though it is unclear how much went through the bank itself.
The true scale of the enterprise is likely to have been larger. A further 17,500 payments were mentioned in the data but the FT was unable to ascertain their value.
The documents also include details of A7-issued promissory notes — basic pledges to pay the bearer a fixed sum — with a face value of more than $20bn. Data in the leak also allowed the FT to identify A7 accounts from which billions of Tether, a dollar-pegged stablecoin used for international payments, were sold to Russian buyers.
The documents show that banks including FAB made anti-money laundering requests to A7’s front companies.
In February 2025, Standard Chartered placed a hold on payments to a series of accounts from the ESB. The trigger appears to have been a slew of payments made on January 20, many of which were cut into small slices, possibly to avoid hitting reporting thresholds.
One company received exactly 20mn renminbi, cut into 12 pieces. Another received the same amount in six tranches. The flow of payments to Standard Chartered dried up at around this time, and more business appears to be routed from banks in the UAE rather than Kyrgyzstan.
A7 documents show that Emirati banks also made anti-money laundering queries in the subsequent months. But their inquiries encountered A7’s forgery factory, which would produce false invoices to get past their inquiries.
First Abu Dhabi told the FT, “as a matter of policy, [it] does not comment on specific matters. The bank takes appropriate action and engages with the relevant authorities where matters of potential concern are identified and as required.”
It confirmed, however, that all of the identified A7-linked accounts had already been identified and closed, adding that it seeks to apply US, UK, EU and UN sanctions.
DBS said it had no direct relationship with A7 itself. It acknowledged that one entity identified by the FT held an account, “in respect of which DBS has taken appropriate actions consistent with its controls”.
Standard Chartered, Citigroup, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank all noted their strong commitment to anti-money laundering reporting but otherwise declined to comment.
A7, Eldik, Aiyl and ESB did not respond to requests for comment.
