called 'micro/CA$H-Register' to whisk the money out of BNY and dispatch it to trusted financial institutions in the South Pacific such as Sinex, later described unflatteringly by US federal prosecutors as a "shell bank in Nauru controlled by principals of DKB". The South Pacific island of Nauru was a popular financial laundromat in the 1990s.

All this time, so these same US federal prosecutors say in an annexe to the "non-prosecution agreement" co-signed in 2005 by Thomas Renyi (right), chairman and CEO of BNY, BNY's supervisors at the One Wall Street branch were never moved to file even so much as one Suspicious Activity Report, or even to display any disquiet at the manifest and illegal trafficking that made Benex and BECS the highest fee producers at the branch, with BNY earning $1m in simple transaction fees. Ignorance is bliss when it’s dangerous to be wise.

When the Feds lowered the boom in 1999, BNY said that by a series of miscommunications - left hand not knowing what the right was doing and that sort of

thing - for three years it had absolutely no idea of what was going on. Indeed BNY had promoted Lucy to a vice-presidential spot during that period.

The Russian couple eventually pleaded guilty in 2000, admitting they'd been paid $1.8m in commissions for their role in the wash. They paid fines, got five years' probation, but nothing in the way of jail time.

The feds imposed record forfeitures - $38m - on BNY (which paid its chairman almost twice that sum in 1999) and made all sorts of fierce noises in the 2005 agreement, but no BNY executive faced actual prosecution, let alone a day behind bars, for being an amenable entrepot for money launderers to an extent that gets humble drug dealers who don't have Alexander Hamilton as a progenitor put away for decades.

In May 2007 the Russian Customs Service filed a $22.5bn claim against the Bank of New York. Its legal onslaught is based on the US Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act, which clambered into the US statute book in 1970,