The political persecution narrative could be boosted by the support from top-tier politicians, preferably the U.S. policymakers. That is why in 2016, Sergei Leontiev began his lobbying efforts with various U.S. institutions.

In the U.S., all lobbying activities are reflected in public records listing both the areas of interests and the stakeholders’ names. Everyone can access a government website and find the information on the lobbyists, their interests, and the agencies or government structures they are working with.

We have gleaned the publicly available information on Sergei Leontiev’s lobbying campaign. In 2016, he registered as a lobbyist and reached out to the Department of State with an eye to the banking system and international relations. In 2017, he promoted his agenda with the Department of Justice and the DoS. In 2018, he lobbied the DoS and the FBI.

In 2018, he re-registered as Grid Market Research, a firm that keeps lobbying the U.S. agencies to this day.

Grid Market Research had a prominent role in this story. At least once, in October 2015, it received a payment from the Latvian account owned by Wonderworks, the stolen money receptacle. In 2021, Grid Market Research was listed as one of ACF’s top donors. It also shares the company address with Anti-Corruption Foundation USA.

Upon registering as a lobbyist, Grid Market Research has invested a ton of money to carry on with Leontiev’s lobbying endeavors. Both Leontiev and his company have spent a total of more than $2.5 million lobbying the agencies.

What does a typical lobbying scheme look like? One example we know of is that Grid Market Research donated to the Atlantic Council, a famous U.S. think tank. According to the organization’s 2018 report, the donation amount was between $50,000 and $100,000.

In 2018, the Atlantic Council ran an expertly report on the way Russia was “interfering” with the U.S. judiciary. The piece cited Alexander Zheleznyak and Sergei Leontiev as the alleged victims of the unlawful bank seizure. The article claimed that the innocent duo was being targeted by a lawyer whose name was on the Magnitsky list, which is true in that the ASV had hired an attorney sanctioned by the U.S. under the Magnitsky Act. However, the bankers were being targeted for the real crime they had committed.

We cannot definitively say if Leontiev and Zheleznyak’s attempts to lobby the members of the U.S. Congress panned out. Nevertheless, in July 2020, three U.S. representatives wrote letters to Liechtenstein’s ambassador to the U.S., looking to have the Princely Court reconsider its account freeze orders.

These letters claim Leontiev was stripped of his business because of his support for the Russian political opposition and his commitment to the anti-corruption cause. As proof, they cite the Magnitsky case, which had nothing to do with Probusinessbank, and the Polish court ruling based on Ashurkov’s statement.

On May 16, 2022, two U.S. representatives published a letter to President Joe Biden. The letter tried to bring his attention to the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA, ASV) because it led the “Kremlin-directed efforts to nationalize the assets of targeted Russian financial institutions, funneling the assets of privately owned businesses to now-sanctioned Russian state banks such as Sberbank, VTB and Gazprombank.”

According to the high-profile letter-writers, many of those businesses (closed banks) were owned by “shareholders and entrepreneurs who lack sufficient political protection from these kinds of schemes or have been blacklisted as political targets of the Russian state.”

The letter called on the ASV to be sanctioned to counter the ASV legal team’s attempts to recover the assets. According to the congressional representatives, it would help curb financial aid that bankrolled the war effort and, lo and behold, “protect the assets of Russia’s private financial institutions.”

Importantly, the ASV has never boasted a spotless reputation. This is a corrupt agency that takes advantage of the insider information to blackmail and leverage thievish bankers and hires the unscrupulous lawyers mentioned in the Magnitsky list.

But in this case, the pushback against the ASV had nothing to do with malpractice or its ties to Russia’s autocratic political regime. Far from it, they were attempting to undermine the ASV’s crusade to reimburse the scammed Probusinessbank customers.

This initiative worked, and the ASV ended up sanctioned. The banksters must have breathed a sigh of relief.

On May 18, 2017, the Liechtenstein authorities froze the accounts owned by Sergei Leontiev and his companies, alleging the money had been embezzled from Probusinessbank. The court decision spurred a flurry of pro-Leontiev publications in the German-language media. They hailed him as a political exile and “Navalny’s banker” and compared his persecution with that of Magnitsky, Khodorkovsky, and Navalny himself.

On Dec. 5, 2020, Liechtenstein’s largest daily newspaper ran an interview with Leontiev’s attorney. According to the lawyer, the Russian justice system was targeting the dissident banker because of the Navalny card project the way it had formerly cracked down on Khodorkovsky and Magnitsky.

In 2022, the Austrian-based profil.at penned three articles on the subject, including an interview with Leontiev. He was repeatedly referred to as a government critic, a dissident, and “Navalny’s banker.”

In November 2020, Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen (SRF, Switzerland) ran a story on Probusinessbank, Sergei Leontiev, and, you guessed it, the Navalny card project. According to SRF, the Russian government pressed charges against Probusinessbank because of their collab with ACF. But the outlet never mentioned the stolen money or the fraud scheme.

And that is by far the most obnoxious aspect of the story. Sergei Magnitsky exposed a government corruption scheme and subsequently died in pretrial detention. Alexei Navalny was the biggest government critic for years and ended up assassinated in a prison colony. Mikhail Khodorkovsky lost his Yukos company and spent ten years behind the bars. It takes a particular brand of cynicism to invoke these cases for the defense of those fraudsters.

And it was not about extraditing the duo to Russia. It was intended to help the banksters brush off the claims of the defrauded customers who tracked down their stolen money and sought to recover it.

What else could “corroborate” the political persecution cover story? One way would be producing an expert assessment by someone with intimate knowledge of Russia. In January 2018, Sergei Leontiev hired Professor Anders Åslund, an economist specializing in Eastern Europe and Russia, in particular. In the early 1990s, he served as Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar’s advisor. He was well-versed in Russia’s economic landscape and authored several academic papers on the Russian economy. Besides, he has always been a staunch critic of the Putin regime.

On Jan. 12, 2018, he testified in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, where he offered an overview of “the political and economic state of affairs in Russia” in the context of Probusinessbank’s closure.

Basically, he just outlined the basic facts about the current Russian system: no rule of law, poorly protected property rights, the government’s obsession with the preservation of power and personal enrichment.

Both the judiciary and the prosecutor-general’s office are totally corrupt. The government stripping entrepreneurs of their businesses is a common practice. He illustrated his claims with the Khodorkovsky and Magnitsky cases. The Central Bank, he continued, is corrupt, too. Some of the banks were deliberately bankrupted to take over the assets. The delicensing and shutdown of Probusinessbank, he concluded, was just one of those cases.

Fair enough. On the one hand, the Russian system is indeed utterly corrupt and cannot be trusted. It can plunder a private bank or jail a businessperson that has gotten in their way. It seems that Western courts should be particularly discerning and be treating the charges on a case-by-case basis to tell a politically motivated case from the actual embezzlement cases.

However, the only caveat was that Professor Åslund was arguing against deciding the case on the merits just because it happened in Russia and there was no point in chasing that rabbit hole.