Governance issues were pushed to the top of the agenda in Singapore yesterday as the world’s financial elite reacted to the killing of Andrei Kozlov, deputy head of the Russian Central Bank.
Kozlov had been “at the forefront of fighting money-laundering”, Russian finance minister Aleksei Kudrin said. The Central Bank’s inspection department, which Kozlov headed, has recently withdrawn licences from 79 banks, mostly for money-laundering offences.
“These banks were often acting in criminal interests and furiously resisted the Central Bank’s measures”, Kudrin said yesterday. He pointed to the example of Diskont Bank, whose licence was taken away on 1 September.
“Certain employees of the bank had tried to remove huge sums of money from it. The Central Bank, and Kozlov personally, acted against them.” A series of criminal cases have been opened as a result.
Kozlov, a well-known figure in international financial circles, died in hospital in the early hours of Thursday after being gunned down outside a Moscow football stadium. The shooting bore the hallmarks of a typical contract killing. Although these were common in the 1990s, Kozlov is the highest-ranking government official to have fallen victim to one.
IMF managing director Rodrigo de Rato and World Bank boss Paul Wolfowitz led finance ministers and central bank governors in expressing condolences to Kudrin, who flew in to Singapore yesterday.
Former US fed chief Paul Volcker, speaking at a seminar in Singapore on Friday, had described Kozlov’s killing as symbolic of a “struggle between the forcers of corruption and the forces of good governance”.