The prosecutor’s office has reversed the decision of the state police not to investigate whether Latvian banks helped to launder at least 63 million dollars from Russia in 2007 as part of a huge tax fraud.

Sergei Magnitsky was a lawyer for Hermitage Capital (an American managed fund investing in Russia) who tried to investigate the theft of money from the fund. His colleagues at Hermitage Capital believe it possible that part of the 63 million dollars laundered through Latvian banks after being stolen from the fund could still be in Latvia.

The Latvian parliamentary committee’s findings on failures of regulating Krajbanka follow an earlier series of stories by the investigative journalism centre Re:Baltica on Antonov and the breakdown of regulation that preceded the collapse of Krajbanka and Snoras.

As Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky slowly died in a Russian prison from abuse and neglect, US$230 million (5.4 billion Russian Rubles) in taxes stolen from his client disappeared into a maze of phantom companies, crooked banks and offshore accounts. Magnitsky, accused of the largest tax scam in Russian state history despite being the whistleblower who reported it, knew who pulled off the theft but not who the powerful people behind them were.

Questions are growing over the role played by Latvia’s Trasta Komercbanka in controversial Ukrainian state tenders in 2011 allegedly involving the embezzlement of hundreds of millions of dollars. According to bne enquiries and the tender documents viewed by bne, companies participating in the tenders were mere creatures of the Latvian bank, which has links to Ukrainian Minister of Energy Yury Boiko.

The massive fraud at the collapsed Snoras bank and Latvijas Krajbanka will cost the taxpayers in Lithuania and Latvia hundreds of millions of euros before the cleanup is complete. Bankruptcy administrators have only just begun to sift through the debris. While Vladimir Antonov was playing a big shell game, building an empire of financial institutions, sports enterprises and car interests, propped up by bank customer deposits, regulators in both countries not only were slow to act on growing warning signs reaching them, but missed supposedly clear signals they sent to each other.

These are the companies controlled by Antonov before the collapse of the Baltic banks in November 2011. Some of them are currently in administration, or already sold.

As the second bank crashes and burns in Latvia costing millions to cash-strapped taxpayers, are there any lessons learned by the state bank regulators?

Banker, entrepreneur and investor is how Vladimir Alexandrovich Antonov describes himself on the business networking site LinkedIn. Currently out on police bail, 36-year-old British-Russian Antonov and his Lithuanian business partner Raimondas Baranauskas were arrested on November 24, 2011 in London after the Lithuanian authorities found over 290 million euros in assets missing from Snoras, Lithuania’s fifth biggest bank by assets, which the pair had a majority stake in.

Interviews with Norwegian executives shed new light on murky Ukrainian deals in 2011, where rigs sold by Norwegian companies to unknown parties were resold to a Ukrainian state oil company in apparently fixed tenders for enormous mark-ups.