A BNE Intellinews article posted March 6 alleges that Forbes-listed billionaire Oleg Tinkov used money he raised from selling his stake in Tinkoff Bank in Russia to help kick start a fintech project south of the border. The Mexico start-up’s co-founders say that is not the case, though, on a video making the rounds in Russia, Oleg calls the project “ours”. Former executives from Tinkoff Bank in Russia, including one American and one Italian who had been working for Oleg in Moscow for years,...

Russia’s Central Bank (RCB) might have preferred the private sector be the bigger player in the financial sector than the state after removing the licenses of hundreds of bad banks prior to 2017, bankrupting many private banks in the process. Today, circumstances are such that the private banking sector no longer has the stomach for the political risks, or the funding, to take over the few banks RCB tried to resuscitate. The strong private banks that remain intact, such as the Alfa Group, are...