Ukraina valde Ryssland före EU - stora protester som följd, länkar i inlägg2

US officials said the St Petersburg lender was "the personal bank" for more than a dozen Russian government officials and powerful business leaders deemed to be members of Vladimir Putin's inner circle.

Those identified as allegedly doing the Russian president's bidding included the bank's billionaire chairman and largest shareholder Yuri Kovalchuk. They claim he acts as "personal banker for Putin", noting he has been referred to as one of the Russian president's "cashiers".

Kovalchuk reputedly forged close ties to Vladimir Putin throughout the 1990s, when Russia's president served as deputy mayor of St Petersburg. The two men still have luxury dachas near each another on Komsomolskoye lake, outside the city.

Kovalchuk is part of a dacha cooperative with other members of this upmarket lakeside community, with several other members also major shareholders in Bank Rossiya.

The bank boss, now estimated by Forbes to have a personal fortune of $1.4bn according to Forbes, helped transform the bank from a Communist party-backed enterprise into a fast-growing and, above all, well-connected bank.

As well as leading the boardroom, Kovalchuk is the largest shareholder in Bank Rossiya, owning close to 30%. Outside banking, he also has interests in a number of federal television channels and a mobile network, Tele2.

The bank has assets of about $10bn and, after its 2010 takeover of Gazenergoprombank, almost doubled in size, breaking into the top 20 of Russian lenders.

Its operations are concentrated in the north-west of Russia and around Moscow, where it is active in a wide range of saving and loan operations, with clients in oil, gas and energy. Bank Rossiya controls large insurance groups Sogas and SK Transneft.

The bank has been well known for its substantial dealings with Russian gas group Gazprom. Banking analysts at Fitch Ratings have noted in the past that Bank Rossiya relied heavily on a tiny handful of customers for about 60% of its funding, some of whom also act as customers and shareholders of the bank.

According to US Treasury officials Bank Rossiya "is the personal bank for senior officials in the Russian Federation" and Kovalchuk "is also the personal banker for senior officials ... including Putin".

According to Standard Bank analyst Timothy Ash, Firtash "has close ties to Russia via the energy sector, and perhaps even to [President Vladimir] Putin." One of the oligarch's chemical companies, Ash notes, got large discounts from Gazprom, Russia's state-controlled gas giant, at a time when Naftohaz, Ukraine's state gas company, was paying premium prices for imports. The ownership of the Swiss-registered gas trading company RosUkrEnergo is also almost evenly divided between Firtash and Gazprom, indicating that the Ukrainian oligarch was a close partner of the Kremlin.

"The arrest is not a coincidence," former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor, told Foreign Policy. "I suspect there are many Ukrainian businesspeople who are very nervous at this point. The United States has put sanctions and visa bans on a few individuals, and Firtash would be a leading candidate. He clearly supported President Yanukovych." The timing of the arrest might have been opportunistic, but the investigations of criminal activity were very real -- and U.S. law enforcement agencies had been closing in for some time. Indeed, Taylor said he suspected that the Austrian operation had something to do with longstanding allegations that Firtash is tied to organized crime in the United States and Europe.