German bank closing the accounts of the Belarusian Trustbank?

The banking conglomerate Commerzbank stops cooperating with the Belarusian bank.

The infobank.by reports about that referring to reliable sources.

The accounts of the Trustbank will be closed starting from 1 February 2013. The Belarusian bank was notified about that on 20 December via the SWIFT system.

The reasons of the decision are so far unknown.

They do not comment on the situation in the Trustbank. The representative office of the Commerzbank in Minsk has also abstained from comments.

We would remind that earlier the Trustbank repeatedly got into scandals connected with laundering of money.

In 2004 the Finance Ministry of the USA introduced sanctions against Infobank, which was accused by the USA of laundering of Saddam Hussein’s money.

Because of that Infobank had to change the name for Trustbank since it suffered from significant image losses. In 2011 a criminal case was started against the chairman of the board of the Belzarubezhstroi company, the head of the supervisory board of the Trustbank Viktar Shautsou, who was suspected of a large scale embezzlement. In May 2012 Trustbank and Kredexbank were introduced in the section 311 of the USA Patriotic act as institutions, causing “top-priority concerns about money laundering”.

Introduction in that list allows the USA finance minister to demand the White House to introduce sanctions against these institutions.

Commerzbank is a German banking conglomerate. It was founded on 26 February 1870. The headquarters are in Frankfurt-on-Maine. The assets account for around 600 billion euro. 36 000 are serving for around 8 million clients in more than 40 countries around the world. Commerzbank is the second largest in Germany in terms of the assets.