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.
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