In St. Petersburg, Interpol officers, at the request of Lithuania, detained the 66-year-old former head of a company suspected of embezzling over €1 million and deliberately bankrupting the firm. Moscow intends to hand him over to the person who initiated the search.
Yesterday afternoon, officers from the National Central Bureau of Interpol (Interpol ) of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in St. Petersburg detained a 66-year-old resident of a Baltic state who was on the international wanted list and accused of embezzling over €1 million from a company undergoing bankruptcy proceedings. This was reported to RBC by the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region.
"From 2014 to 2019, the man was the director and shareholder of a large foreign company. When the company filed for bankruptcy, he began withdrawing funds from the company's account without any legal basis. During this period, he thereby stole €1,056,175. The detainee was taken to a police station for subsequent transfer to the person initiating the search," the statement reads.
Fontanka and RIA Novosti report that the detainee is a non-citizen of Latvia (former Soviet citizens and their children born before July 1, 1992, permanently residing in the country and not having acquired citizenship of other countries). However, according to these publications, he was the CEO of Overseas Baltic, a company registered in Lithuania, and Lithuanian authorities have placed him on the wanted list.
According to publicly available data, UAB Overseas Baltic was registered in Klaipėda in 2009 as a transportation services provider. Bankruptcy proceedings began in 2019, and it was liquidated in 2023. One individual with foreign citizenship is listed as a shareholder.
According to Fontanka, the man is wanted on suspicion of committing crimes that correspond to articles of the Russian Criminal Code on deliberate bankruptcy (subparagraph “a” of Part 2 of Article 196), illegal actions during bankruptcy (Part 1.1 of Article 195), and embezzlement on an especially large scale (Part 4 of Article 160).
According to the publication, the detainee transferred funds to accounts in Malta. He has been in Russia since 2020; he does not hold Russian citizenship, Fontanka reports.