Reuters reports:
Armed, masked law enforcement officers on Thursday raided a bank part-owned by Mikhail Prokhorov, a billionaire Russian magnate who is leading a political party into a December parliamentary election, officials and lawyers said.
The head of the International Finance Club bank, known by its Russian acronym MFK, said the evening raid on the bank’s office in central Moscow had nothing to do with Prokhorov’s Right Cause party or even with the bank’s operations.
“Investigative actions were conducted in relation to one of our borrowers. This has nothing to with Right Cause or Onexim,” the bank’s chief, Oksana Lifar, told Reuters by telephone. Onexim is Prokhorov’s investment vehicle.
But the raid raised eyebrows in a country where critics of the authorities face harassment and law enforcement officers are sometimes employed to put pressure on opponents in business disputes.
