Menatep's Trust Denies Raid Targeted Kasyanov.

(From The Moscow Times)

Trust investment bank CEO Ilya Yurov vehemently denied Thursday a newspaper report that claimed prosecutors, during investigations this week, demanded information about his bank's client Rossiisky Bank Razvitiya, or RBR, a state-owned bank created under the patronage of Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

"That is absolute rubbish," Yurov said in response to Kommersant's front-page article Thursday that was headlined, "They Have Come for Kasyanov."

"The situation is nervous enough without making it worse with lies," he said, referring to the full-on legal assault on oil major Yukos, which has the same parent company as Trust.

Kommersant reported that prosecutors and FSB agents arrived at Trust on Tuesday to seize information on RBR and several other clients of the bank, one of the financial arms in the Menatep empire, which has been under siege since the arrest of its chairman and core Yukos shareholder Platon Lebedev on charges of embezzlement nearly a month ago.

The paper, owned by exiled tycoon Boris Berezovsky, claimed that prosecutors were escalating investigations to possibly target the accounts of Kasyanov. The prime minister came under fire from prosecutors earlier this week because of public statements that were seen as supporting Yukos.

Yurov said that law enforcement officials had seized documents and downloaded information regarding transactions conducted by 15 of the bank's clients, which, he said, did not include RBR. He said he believed the investigation to be part of the probe into possible tax evasion by Lebedev, a new charge that prosecutors filed last week. He could not, however, reveal the names of the clients because of confidentiality laws.