Over $6.9 Billion Passed Through Banks Despite Sanctions. The Main Channel Into the EU Reportedly Ran Through a Company in Hungary, FT Says

The fintech network A7, founded in late 2024 in Russia and Kyrgyzstan by Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor with the support of Russia's state-owned Promsvyazbank, transferred at least $6.9 billion through the international banking system. Russian companies thus gained access, via shell companies, to payments in the SWIFT network, from which key Russian banks were cut off after the invasion of Ukraine. This emerges from hundreds of thousands of internal documents obtained by Britain's Financial Times and published on Monday. Financial Times ↗ Part of the payments were directed toward military equipment and the procurement of Russian security services, with the main channel for money heading into the European Union appearing, according to the newspaper, to be a company registered in Hungary, which it did not name. HotNews ↗

A Factory for Forgeries

Despite its cryptocurrency facade, the entire mechanism rested on a very old foundation. Financial Times journalist Chris Cook described it directly in the newspaper's podcast as old-fashioned money laundering. The network set up or used shell companies in countries with normal access to the international banking system, sent money to their accounts, and these companies then paid the invoices that Russian clients needed. If a Russian company had to pay a supplier in China, the payment would appear in the banking system as, for example, a transfer from a company in the United Arab Emirates. HotNews ↗

When banks requested proof of the origin and purpose of a transaction, what the newspaper describes as a genuine forgery factory kicked in. Employees had access to thousands of company stamps, some manufactured and some copied from documents of real businesses that were unaware their data was being misused. Customs codes for sanctioned goods were replaced with the nearest codes for non-sanctioned products, and Cyrillic script and any other Russian trace were removed from invoices. Rzeczpospolita ↗

The most illustrative case involves five hundred night-vision sights worth approximately $510,000, which the network procured for a Russian customer in February 2025. In the documentation, they were declared as safety glass. Internal communications show that employees also considered a footwear variant but decided it would not match the recipient's invoice history, so they stuck with glass. HotNews ↗

The network also purchased CNC machine tools worth €1.77 million for the company Interconsul, which Britain sanctioned in June of this year and which the Financial Times links to a network tied to Russia's military intelligence service, the GRU. Rzeczpospolita ↗

Where the Money Flowed

The newspaper identified a hundred shell companies that actually carried out the payments, and the documents mention at least another hundred. Most were located in Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates, with others in Kyrgyzstan and Indonesia, and at least three in Britain. The largest payer was a now-dissolved Kyrgyz state company, established by the country's Ministry of Economy in October 2024, which managed to process transactions worth $2.5 billion. More than half of all the flows tracked ultimately ended up in accounts in China and Hong Kong. Rzeczpospolita ↗

The names of the world's largest banks appeared in individual links of the chain. About $1.1 billion arrived at accounts in Standard Chartered's Hong Kong branch between late 2024 and August 2025, more than $1.8 billion in payments went out through First Abu Dhabi Bank, $273 million was directed to Singapore's DBS, $74 million to Citigroup clients, and roughly $18 million to Deutsche Bank's European clients. According to the newspaper, accounts at JPMorgan Chase were also used. Index ↗

Safeguards only began to kick in after some delay. In February 2025, Standard Chartered noticed that transfers were being split into small transactions and blocked the accounts. Some of the activity then shifted to the Emirates. First Abu Dhabi Bank confirmed to the newspaper that it had identified and closed all accounts linked to the network. DBS stated that it had taken appropriate measures against the identified client. The other Western banks contacted limited themselves to general statements about their commitment to fighting money laundering. Neither A7 itself nor Shor responded to the Financial Times' questions. Newsmaker ↗

The Hungarian Trail the Newspaper Did Not Name

For a Central European reader, the most sensitive sentence in the investigation is this one: when it comes to purchases within the European Union, the main channel for payments into the bloc appears to be a single company in Hungary. The newspaper does not name it and phrases the point cautiously, without disclosing details about its role. Budapest's Index, which reported the story as domestic news, summed it up bluntly right in its headline: a Russian money-laundering network also operated through Hungary and moved enormous sums. Index ↗

The scope may not even be final. Approximately 17,500 payments in the leaked data remain unvalued, and the documents also include promissory notes issued by the network with a nominal value exceeding $20 billion. Zach Tvarozna, an analyst at the Open Source Centre who has long studied A7's activities, told the newspaper that the new evidence points to a scale substantially larger than anyone had previously assumed. Rzeczpospolita ↗

The Day Before the Sanctions List Got Shorter

The timing gives the whole affair a second dimension. The newspaper published its investigation on Monday, and our Monday round-up of the European press gave it a single sentence. On Tuesday morning, Latvia was still blocking a compromise under which two Russian billionaires were to be removed from the European Union's sanctions list, but member states approved the agreement that afternoon. Sanctions against roughly three thousand Russian and Belarusian individuals and entities were extended by 36 months, that is, until September 2029, and Alisher Usmanov, Mikhail Fridman, along with another individual and one entity, were removed from the list. So the day after the newspaper described the industrial-scale circumvention of the sanctions regime, that same regime shrank by a few names. SITA ↗

This concerns Slovakia directly. The daily SME wrote that Slovakia got its way on this point and that Robert Fico had long lobbied for both billionaires. But Slovakia was not alone: the removal of Usmanov had been pushed since early September mainly by France, citing national security, with Luxembourg joining in on Fridman's case. Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha called their removal shameful and unjustifiable. Estonia's Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna told Reuters on Tuesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly that France needs to explain its actions, since the removal sends a very bad signal at a very inappropriate time. SME ↗

Also read: Dispute over removing Usmanov and Fridman blocks extension of EU sanctions

A7 itself is not an unknown quantity. Britain sanctioned it back in May 2025, and both the company and its stablecoin gradually came under European Union measures as well. Money nevertheless kept flowing through banks in Hong Kong, the Emirates, and Europe. The documents obtained by the newspaper extend to August 2025, so they say nothing about what the network did afterward. In July, Shor still boasted about his system's resilience in an interview with Russia's TASS news agency, saying it offers companies and countries freedom because the system is immune to sanctions. The Financial Times used the quote in its investigation. HotNews ↗

Limits of This Account

The investigation rests on internal documents leaked from a single company, and the Financial Times itself notes that it cannot put a value on part of the payments. The companies and banks that appeared in the chain are not automatically accomplices. Processing a payment alone does not prove a bank knew about sanctions evasion. First Abu Dhabi Bank reviewed and closed the suspicious accounts, and Standard Chartered blocked them. The Hungarian company is not named, so for now we know nothing about its owners or whether they were aware of the nature of the payments. Although sources agree on the key figures, they diverge on details of A7's ownership structure, so this text does not state them. Rzeczpospolita ↗

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