Monaco was placed on the grey list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in June 2024 because of insufficient anti-money-laundering efforts. According to Bloomberg, FATF acknowledged that the principality may soon be removed from the list, and in 2025–2026 AMSF began publishing the results of its inspections. About a third of the problematic client files, according to the regulator, are linked to Russia.
From March to June 2024, AMSF inspected UBS Monaco. In one file, the bank explained the client’s wealth by gifts from her brother: he transferred $70 million and several properties to her, but UBS did not collect documents confirming the source of his own funds. The woman worked as a gynecologist, and after sanctions were imposed on her brother, she also came under restrictions; based on the details of the file, this refers to Saodat Narzieva, sister of Alisher Usmanov.
An OCCRP investigation previously reported that Narzieva was the beneficiary of 27 Credit Suisse accounts, and the maximum balance on one of them exceeded $2 billion. UBS closed her account in March 2025. In the UBS materials, the regulator also described a client who made money from Kuzbass coal, one of whose companies was accused of fraud; compliance warned that this company had been placed on the sanctions list of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), but UBS opened him an account in Monaco in 2017.
In October, AMSF inspected Julius Baer Wealth Management Monaco and pointed to Viktor Fedotov, former head of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium. The bank reported suspicions only in June 2022, although grounds for them had appeared about a year earlier, and after the regulator’s assessment Julius Baer ended its relationship with Fedotov. In 2021, Pandora Papers revealed that Fedotov was a hidden co-owner of VNIIST — a contractor for Transneft: an internal Transneft report accused VNIIST of diverting about $140 million, and Fedotov’s associated offshore company received at least $98 million; Guardian wrote that a trust linked to him bought a private Bombardier for $34 million.
In November, AMSF reached Guardian Management, where one of the clients was Leonid Novitsky, former first deputy CEO of Rosagroleasing and brother of former Agriculture Minister Elena Skrynnik. According to Interfax, as early as 2015 the Swiss prosecutor’s office investigated a money-laundering case involving Novitsky, his wife and Skrynnik, and it concerned alleged embezzlement of more than 1 billion rubles from Rosagroleasing. Guardian initially took Novitsky’s connection to Skrynnik into account, but later downgraded the client’s risk, and AMSF found no sufficient analysis in the file for such a decision.
In the materials of the corporate provider ICS, the regulator identified Alexey Fedorychev, owner of Fedcominvest, who was engaged in trading sulfur, fertilizers and grain and owned stakes in port terminals in Ukraine. In 2024, Italian authorities, at Ukraine’s request, seized assets linked to him worth 41 million euros, including real estate in Florence, and in Ukraine the businessman was suspected of corruption, fraud and money laundering; AMSF’s claims concerned how ICS treated this negative information.
The regulator also identified five more clients with Russian ties, but did not publicly disclose their names. Among them were a Russian oligarch and a former vice president of Russian Railways, who became an ICS client in 2018, as well as another businessman whose file contained suspicions of corruption, fraud and money laundering and whose assets in Monaco were frozen at the request of the Ukrainian authorities. At Banque Havilland, AMSF drew attention to the wife of the head of a public Russian power company: the bank did not confirm the source of the family capital and was recommended to close her account. Another Banque Havilland client, a Russian citizen from the UAE, carried out through a company in the British Virgin Islands a transaction the bank could not economically explain: in January 2024, the company paid him 3 million euros in dividends and three days later received them back as a loan.
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