Russian customs bid to break the BNY

On July 3, the very eve of America's annual celebration of Independence Day, a Moscow courtroom sizzled with acrid testimonials to the effect that the oldest bank in the US is internationally accountable on charges of money laundering and, if convicted, will have to pony up $22.5bn to the Russian Customs Service, said sum representing just over a third of the bank's capital.

The outfit in question is the indubitably venerable Bank of New York, founded in 1784 by investors including Alexander Hamilton, first US Secretary of the Treasury, Aaron Burr (who later killed Hamilton in a duel) and the Bank of England. At least part of the start-up capital was money filched from a public works scheme to clean up Manhattan's drinking water.

Today BNY–Mellon, as it's formally known, is

a huge private bank catering to blue chip companies and clients round the world.

In the early 1990s, BNY scented opportunity in Russia and soon became a favoured port of call for customers in the former Soviet Union eager to dispatch very large sums of money overseas. Assisting BNY in this hospitable activity was a Russian couple, Peter Berlin and his wife Lucy Edwards, who finally removed from the Russian Federation and settled in New York. In 1996 Peter set up a couple of companies, Benex and BECS, with accounts at the BNY Branch at One Wall St, Lower Manhattan.

For the next three years, astoundingly large sums sluiced into these accounts, remitted from Moscow by a Russian enterprise called Depositarno Kliringovy Bank (DKB), for whom Peter and Lucy were acting as front operators, in a money-laundering operation of the utmost simplicity. Between 1996 and 1999, $7.5bn flowed into the BNY accounts.

The couple would sit in front of their computers using a BNY software program