Swiss bankers accused of lax control of Putin pal’s accounts

GENEVA — Four former bankers with the now-shuttered Swiss affiliate of a major Russian bank have gone on trial over allegations that they didn’t properly check accounts opened in the name of a Russian cellist with longtime ties to President Vladimir Putin.

The one-day trial in Zurich district court Wednesday stems from information about secretive financial flows revealed in the Panama Papers leaks in 2016 that implicated musician and Putin’s childhood friend Sergei Roldugin. It took years for prosecutors to unravel the web of money and bring the case to court.

The trial opens a rare window into allegations from the Panama Papers that a member of Putin’s circle of friends helped funnel millions abroad and that financial employees may have turned a blind eye to such inflows. Putin has denied the accusations.

Both before and since Putin ordered forces into Ukraine, Western nations have imposed sanctions against oligarchs and others with close ties to his government, including Roldugin. The U.S. Treasury Department describes Roldugin as “part of a system that manages President Putin’s offshore wealth.”

The former Gazprombank employees — three Russian-born and one Swiss-born who cannot be named under Swiss law — are charged with failing to adequately check whether Roldugin, who was a client of the bank from 2014 to 2016, actually owned the assets in the accounts.

Documents filed when the accounts were opened listed expected transactions of 11.5 million Swiss francs ($12.2 million). The indictment doesn’t indicate how much of that may have arrived at the bank.

It is “publicly known that Russian President Putin officially has an income of just over 100,000 Swiss francs and is not wealthy, but in fact has enormous assets managed by people close to him,” according to the indictment.

The document says Gazprombank maintained the accounts despite “abundant” media reports about Roldugin’s relationship to Putin, including that he was godfather to one of Putin’s daughters.

The bank’s documents listed Roldugin’s income as 1 million Swiss francs a year, his assets at 10 million francs and his occupation as a musician, indicating that the money flows were “in no way plausible as Roldugin’s own wealth” and that the way the accounts were structured indicated he was being used as “a straw man,” the indictment shows.

It cited a New York Times article published in 2014 that quotes Roldugin as saying he did not have millions. He was registered as…