As Leontiev and Zheleznyak fled Russia, their bank’s crippled balance sheet did not just take a toll on Probusinessbank’s customers. Another category of scammed individual that took a direct hit were the note holders. We are not going to take a deep dive into it, but here is what happened.

Importantly, this story is fundamentally different from the previous ones. Using these shell company schemes, they defrauded the banks customers of their money. Those were ordinary people and business owners who kept their money with a large bank without ever expecting any foul play. As for the notes payable, this scheme only applied to the «special category customers», some of them controversial characters.

But Leontiev's attorneys seek to conflate the two plotlines as if those were identically. They were not.

Zheleznyak and Leontiev had a special category of customers in search of unconventional financial strategies. Those individuals had a ton of cash but no proof of origin to enter a financial market. In exchange for that cash, LIFE Group’s executives were offering them notes payable at a 10% annual interest rate.

A note payable is a type of security also referred to as a promissory note.

Those “special customers” were duped into investing truckloads of cash in exchange for those promissory notes. Crucially, those notes were not signed by the bank’s executives but by the Cyprus-based shell outfits or LIFE Group, a regular company with an authorized share capital of just 10K rubles.

Those sketchy types were swapping their cash for a scrap of colored paper secured by the promises coming from Leontiev and Zheleznyak. Sure enough, they were never reimbursed once the banksters beat a hasty retreat.

Who were those mysterious customers? Two of them, Alexander Varshavsky and Kamo Avagumyan, the co-owners of the Avilon car dealership, pressed charges in the U.S. Except that effort drew a blank. They found it hard to prove the elusive bankers owed them dozens of millions of bucks by producing a crummy note payable signed by a shonky Cyprus-based outfit.

Avagumyan and Varshavsky presented the court with a bulk of evidence proving the embezzlement on the part of Probusinessbank’s execs. These records are now publicly available. Some of those documents ignited our investigation.

Another note holder was Diana Karapetyan. Between April and June 2015, she paid a total of $4 million in exchange for the notes payable from another Cyprus-base shell company: Venom Trading Limited.

We had no clue who that woman was. But as irony would have it, back then, there was a top-ranking Prosecutor-General’s Office honcho named Saak Karapetyan. Incidentally, he had a daughter named—surprise, surprise—Diana.

So, bear in mind Probusinessbank’s execs were very much part of the establishment and in cahoots with the ruling class. Prosecutorial bigwigs would have never entrusted an outsider with a multi-million-dollar fortune. We will get back to it in our future discussion of Leontiev and Zheleznyak posing as the opposition figures.

• Notes payable