MOSCOW, September 22 (RAPSI) – Russia’s law enforcement agencies are investigating the withdrawal of nearly 700 billion rubles (over $18 billion) from Russia via 21 banks, Vedomosti newspaper writes on Monday.

The newspaper sites letters that Moldova’s financial monitoring service and the anti-money laundering service of Moldova’s National Anticorruption Center to Russia’s Interior Ministry, according to which false injunctions were issued by Moldovan district courts to withdraw massive funds from Russia.

“Foreign companies have signed loan contracts under which Russian firms allegedly took out loans worth between $100 million and $875 million or acted as loan guarantors. When obligations under these fictitious debts were not satisfied, creditors filed suits with Moldovan courts, because certain Moldovan citizens also acted as loan guarantors. These guarantors came from socially disadvantaged families who claimed to have known nothing about these loan contracts and insist that their signatures were falsified,” Vedomosti writes, citing a letter to Sergei Solopov, deputy head of the Russian Interior Ministry’s Main Department for Economic Security and Corruption Prevention.

From March 2011 to April 2014, the fraudsters have withdrawn nearly 700 billion rubles (over $18 billion), the Moldovan financial intelligence service writes in its letter. The funds were removed from the accounts of about a hundred Russian companies with 21 Russian banks that have correspondent accounts with Moldova’s BC Moldindconbank S.A. The money was then transferred to 19 firms that were registered in the UK, New Zealand and Belize and had accounts with Moldindconbank and Latvia’s Trasta Komercbanka, the newspaper writes.