Page 11 - bne magazine September 2023

bne September 2023 Companies & Markets I 11
INTERVIEW:
The Austrian troubleshooter cleaning up
the Moldovan ‘laundromat’ bank
Jason Corcoran in Dublin
When Herbert Stepic, one of Central Europe's most famous bankers, was looking for a CEO to rebuild the shady bank once at the centre of Moldova’s noto- rious ‘Russian Laundromat’ scheme, Alexander Picker was likely to have been at the top of his list.
Stepic, the former chairman at Raiffeisen Bank International and now the chairman of Moldindconbank, turned to
his fellow Austrian because of Picker’s expertise at crisis management built up over the past 30 years during a number of high-profile banking jobs across Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia.
But transforming the image of the Chisinau-based Mold- indconbank, the main conduit of the $22bn brazen Russian money-laundering scheme, hasn’t been Picker’s toughest assignment.
“Yes, I do like difficult things,” Picker told bne IntelliNews in an interview. “Stepic asked me to get my hands dirty again but it’s not the toughest job I have ever had.”
Picker, who was approved by regulators for the Moldincon- bank role in March, maintains that running ATF Bank in Kazakhstan in the aftermath of the 2008 global credit crisis was a much more challenging gig.
The Austrian arrived in Kazakhstan after the Italian lender UniCredit acquired Almaty Trade Finance (ATF) bank in June 2007.
“I could see before the deal closed that there was a problem looming, but I didn’t dare go to the boss Mr [Alessandro] Profumo and tell him not to close because it will never work out,” recalled Picker.
The international credit crisis hit Kazakhstan hard, laying waste to its financial sector by exposing an era of over-zealous borrowing and lending as well as overt mismanagement. UniCredit ended up paying $2.3bn for ATF bank before offloading it in 2013 to a local Kazakh firm for just $500mn.
Alexander Picker: "It’s not the toughest job I have ever had." / Alexander Picker
Picker stayed at the Kazakh lender until 2010 before moving to Hypo-Alpe-Adria International Group in Slovenia as chief executive to clean up its operations after the Austrian govern- ment was forced to take it over in 2009.
His career has included stints running banks in Bosnia & Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia, Uzbekistan and Russia, while he still shuttles occasionally to Mongolia in his capacity as a board member of Golomt Bank.
Tarnished reputation
But right now, most of his time is spent on trying to scour and scrub Moldinconbank’s tarnished reputation. Probes in 2014 by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting
“OCCRP revealed how at least $21bn was wired from Russia to accounts held by offshore shell companies at Moldindconbank”
Project (OCCRP), the Eastern European-based investigative journalism group, revealed how at least $21bn was wired from Russia to accounts held by offshore shell companies at Moldindconbank.
OCCRP found that Ilan Mironovich Shor, the Israeli-Moldovan politician, headed a group of 39 mostly shell companies that were allegedly involved in the theft and laundering schemes.
The money came from fraudulent court decisions, in which bribed Moldovan judges ruled that Russian companies and Moldovan citizens must pay debts to the offshore corpora- tions. In reality, the debts were phony, and the ruse simply allowed Russian criminals to launder and move stolen money out of their country.
Shor runs a now banned political party called the Shor Party
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