Standard Chartered, Citigroup and other international banks channelled billions of dollars through their systems linked to the Kremlin-backed fintech company A7, which penetrated the global financial system through a large-scale document-forgery operation.
This is reported by the Financial Times. The newspaper says it obtained hundreds of thousands of files from A7’s internal systems — a group created as an alternative to the Western payments system. The files show how the company used traditional money-laundering schemes to move more than $6.9bn through the international banking system, despite sanctions against Russia.
Some payments identified in the leak related to highly sensitive war-linked goods, including military equipment and procurement for Russia’s security agencies.
A7 was set up in Russia and Kyrgyzstan by Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor with the backing of the state-owned Promsvyazbank, which is linked to Russia’s defence industry. The company is presented by the Kremlin as an important tool for international payments after Russian banks were cut off from the Swift system in 2022. Accounts 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 received $273m, and Citigroup clients received $74m.
Clients of Deutsche Bank in Europe received about $18m. A7 opened accounts at First Abu Dhabi Bank, the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, for 17 different entities, which made outgoing payments of more than $1.8bn. The company also opened accounts at JPMorgan Chase and DBS.
The Financial Times found evidence that A7 used 100 shell companies to make payments. The documents mention at least another 100 such entities, including at least 61 in the UAE, 87 in Hong Kong, 16 in Kyrgyzstan and 14 in Indonesia.
While most of the largest front entities were shell companies controlled by A7, the largest single entity making payments was a now-closed state organisation in Kyrgyzstan — the Trading Company of the Kyrgyz Republic.
At least three entities were registered in the UK, where A7 was sanctioned in May 2025. One company in Hungary appears to have become a key channel for payments into the EU.
Under the A7 scheme, shell companies arranged cash deposits into banks connected to the Swift system, after which the funds could be used to pay invoices for Russian companies abroad. The final destination for just over half of all flows was accounts at Chinese banks.
A7 is now a major payments operator for ordinary civilian companies and claims to process almost a fifth of Russia’s foreign-exchange transactions. A7 made significant efforts to deceive banks’ anti-money-laundering screening systems. Shell companies prepared forged documents in advance, creating a paper trail designed to conceal the true nature of transactions.
This included a library of thousands of corporate stamps: some were forged, while others were taken from genuine documents belonging to unsuspecting companies.
Shell companies were given instructions on how to describe the goods they were buying so as not to arouse suspicion. For example, staff were told to replace customs codes for sanctioned goods with the closest alternative codes that were not subject to sanctions. They also carefully maintained plausible narratives about buyers and sellers.
In one case, a payment of $510,000 in fact related to 500 night-vision devices for a Russian client, but the documents attempted to present the goods as glass. The scheme also involved concealing the “Russian trace” in documents, including removing Cyrillic characters and changing details about buyers, goods and delivery.
The fintech company exploited weaknesses in the Swift system, which largely relies on the sending bank properly vetting its customers. If A7 managed to bypass the controls of even one participating bank, it opened a route for payments to pass through the system.
In the early stages of the scheme, in late 2024 and early 2025, A7 moved large volumes of funds through three Kyrgyz banks: Eldik, Aiyl and Eurasian Savings Bank (ESB).
A7 documents indicate that Standard Chartered suspected wrongdoing in February 2025. The bank had no direct correspondent relationships with these Kyrgyz banks, and A7 recipient accounts there were soon closed.
After that, A7 shifted its activity and began routing more payments through the UAE. First Abu Dhabi Bank processed the bulk of the flows. A7 shell companies opened more than a dozen accounts there, from which they made outgoing payments of $1.3bn and a further roughly $500m in internal transactions between themselves. The bank also played an important role for A7 by enabling the conversion of UAE dirhams via its correspondent banks into dollars, euros and yuan — a service required to carry out international settlements.
The documents show that banks detected suspicious transactions and sent queries about their origin, but A7 responded with forged documents created specifically to pass checks. First Abu Dhabi said it had closed all identified A7-linked accounts, while other major banks reaffirmed their commitment to anti-money-laundering procedures without commenting on specific transactions.
The true scale of the operation was likely even larger. The data mentions a further 17,500 payments, but the Financial Times was unable to determine their total value.