MOSCOW, June 26 (RAPSI) – Moscow’s Tagansky District Court has sentenced a former advisor to the board’s chairman of DS-Bank Viktor Averin to 4.5 years in penal colony in a case over embezzlement of about 585 million rubles (around $8.5 million at the current exchange rate) from the credit organization, the press service of the Prosecutor General’s Office reports.

Additionally, the defendant has been fined 500,000 rubles.

Earlier, Averin pleaded guilty.

According to investigators, from August 2015 to April 2016, members of an organized criminal group consisting of DS-Bank’s top managers and employees, being aware of banking violations and imminent revocation of the bank’s license, transferred 585 million rubles to sham companies. This sum constituted the entirety of the bank’s correspondent account.

Shortly before this move alleged criminals cancelled processing of client-oriented banking operations under the pretense of experiencing technical difficulties, investigators added, noting that the bank’s servers were damaged while all documents and registries were transported away from the office.

Other defendants in the case are chairman of the bank’s board Igor Sinyukhin, head of the credit department Alexander Vdovin,  DS-Bank’s ex-head Fyodor Tsyrulnik and unemployed persons, Vitaly Vergizov and Andrey Kuznetsov.

DS-Bank’s license was revoked in May 2016, and investigators believe that Tsyrulnik has resided in the Republic of Mauritius since then.