Russian Central Banker Assassinated

From Bloomberg:

Russian central banker Andrei Kozlov, who led a fight against corruption in the nation’s banking industry, was assassinated outside a sports stadium in Moscow.
Kozlov, a 41-year-old deputy chairman of the central bank, was shot in the head and neck by two gunmen last night, said Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman at the Moscow prosecutor’s office. He died in hospital No. 33 in Moscow this morning.
The murder may be linked to Kozlov’s job leading the central bank’s fight against money laundering, Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, the highest-ranking law enforcement official, said in a statement on his Web site today. Kozlov was instrumental in pushing measures to regulate a banking system that almost collapsed after the government defaulted on $40 billion of debt in 1998.
“There are people in Russia who do not want the transparent, law-abiding and rational system he was creating,” said Richard Hainsworth, chief executive officer of RusRating, an independent bank rating company in Moscow. “His reforms have pushed up the price of black money, of giving bribes.”

Posted by on September 14th, 2006 at 9:01 am


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