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Financial Times: $6.9 billion through international banks, how Russia bypassed sanctions with A7
2026-09-22 10:13:00 / BOTA
A vast financial fraud network, suspected of being set up with the support of the Kremlin, has enabled Russian fintech company A7 to channel more than $6.9 billion through the international banking system, despite sanctions imposed on Russia following the start of the war in Ukraine.
The revelation was made by the Financial Times, which analyzed hundreds of thousands of documents obtained from inside the company. According to the investigation, A7 used a vast network of shell companies, forged documents and fraudulent data to disguise the real nature of the transactions.
Some of the largest international banks appear in transactions related to A7.
According to documents obtained by the Financial Times, some of the transactions also relate to war-sensitive goods, including military equipment and purchases made for Russian security services.
A7 was created in Russia and Kyrgyzstan as an alternative for international payments, after Russian banks were excluded from the SWIFT system following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The company was founded by Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor, with the support of Promsvyazbank, a Russian state-owned bank with close ties to the defense industry.
The Kremlin has presented A7 as one of Russia's leading providers of cross-border import payments.
However, according to the Financial Times investigation, the company did not rely solely on financial technology to circumvent sanctions. Documents show the use of fictitious companies, forged invoices and altered product descriptions to avoid bank controls.
Data analyzed by the Financial Times shows that accounts in Hong Kong received about $1.1 billion from entities linked to A7, from late 2024 to August 2025.
The investigation identified about 100 shell companies that made payments during the period covered by the leaked data. The documents also mention dozens of other similar entities in the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Kyrgyzstan and Indonesia.
According to the Financial Times, these companies used forged documents to present products and transactions as something other than what they actually were.
A7 allegedly had thousands of company seals at its disposal, some forged and others copied from real company documents that were unaware of their use.
Company employees, according to the documents, instructed customers on how to describe products to avoid sanctions checks. In some cases, the customs codes of sanctioned products were replaced with similar, but not prohibited, codes.
One of the cases included in the leaked documents relates to the purchase of 500 night vision binoculars, worth about $510,000, for a Russian client in February 2025.
A7 employees had prepared documents describing the product as “reinforced glass.” At one point, the possibility of declaring it as “shoes” was discussed, but in the end, it was decided to keep the original description to avoid suspicion.
The documents also show efforts to remove any Russian traces from the documentation, through changing the data of buyers, products and shipments, as well as eliminating Cyrillic letters.
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