Prigozhin secretly used Western banks for payments to Wagner – media

The American bank JPMorgan Chase and the British HSBC unwittingly processed payments for African companies controlled by the late Russian military leader of the Wagner PMC, Evgeniy Prigozhin. This was reported by the Financial Times with reference to documents obtained by the Center for Advanced Defense Studies.

The Wagner ringleader has built a transnational natural resource criminal empire, in part by secretly using the payment systems of Western financial institutions.

One of the invoices shows that in August 2017, the Sudanese mining company Meroe Gold, which served as a front for Wagner, sent a payment from a local bank account through JPMorgan Chase as an intermediary bank in New York to a supplier in China.

Another invoice from the same year shows that Meroe Gold sent payment for diesel generators and spare parts to a Chinese company through Hang Seng Bank, part of the HSBC Group.

However, there is no evidence that these banks knew that they were processing transactions related to structures controlled by PMC Wagner.

At the time of the payments, Meroe Gold was not under US sanctions, even though Prigozhin had been under sanctions since 2016. Meroe Gold was subject to US sanctions only in 2018.

Journalists contacted the banks with a request to comment on this information. JPMorgan said it reviewed the information and found no records consistent with those transactions. HSBC declined to comment on the Sudanese payments mentioned.

Let’s remember that, according to British intelligence, the size of the Wagner group has decreased tenfold in the past year. The remains are in Belarus and Africa.