What A7 is and how it became the largest player in the shadow payments market

Sanctions against Russian banks and payment systems, along with their disconnection from SWIFT after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, gave rise to shadow intermediaries offering Russians cross-border money transfers. Many have offices in the capital’s Moscow City business district, the investigative outlet Proekt reported in spring 2026.

The largest is A7, a company owned by Moldovan businessman Ilan Shor, who was convicted of fraud and embezzlement in Moldova. Shor owns a controlling stake; the remaining 49% belongs to Russia’s state-owned Promsvyazbank (PSB). In late 2019, PSB officially became the designated bank for Russia’s Defense Ministry and defense industry.

The state development corporation VEB.RF, headed by Igor Shuvalov, “provides support” to A7. Proekt’s journalists suggest that Roman Abramovich may play “an important but secret role in the company.” A source in the cross-border payments business described Abramovich to Proekt as A7’s “protector and sponsor.” In the source’s view, Abramovich began working with Shor because he valued Shor’s ability to “devise financial schemes.” Abramovich’s representatives deny that he is involved in A7.

A business partner of Abramovich’s, who spoke to Proekt on condition of anonymity, estimated that A7 handles about 15% of all cross-border transfers in Russia. The company puts its share even higher, at 19%. “No one else even comes close to A7,” a source working in the market told Proekt. The outlet’s other sources agreed that A7 is the largest player in the industry.

Proekt obtained a list of all of A7’s clients. They included at least 25 Russian companies already under U.S. and EU sanctions. Five manufacture or supply combat drones used by the Russian army in its war against Ukraine.

Other A7 clients include Arkady Rotenberg’s tour operator Biblioglobus, the online marketplace Wildberries, cigarette manufacturer International Tobacco Group, the Sunlight jewelry chain, and industrial companies including Leonid Mikhelson’s natural gas producer Arctic LNG 2, AAEM Turbine Technologies, and S7 Engineering.

In late October, journalists from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) expanded on Proekt’s investigation. After reviewing internal company documents and speaking with sources, they found that most payments entering A7’s network are funded by hundreds of metric tons of rubles in cash collected from individuals and companies at several Moscow wholesale and retail markets, including the largest, Sadovod.

Sadovod is known as a market where most transactions are conducted in cash, and many of its shop employees and owners are migrant workers from countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States. “Sadovod is simply a big client base,” a source familiar with the situation told ICIJ, explaining A7’s choice of location.

How the scheme works

Before 2022, intermediaries at Sadovod were already converting cash into ordinary bank transfers or into cryptocurrency, which most often went to China. Western sanctions later disrupted this system by cutting Russian companies off from SWIFT.

A7’s improved system allowed a group of brokers at Sadovod to keep operating. They now accept bags of cash brought in by vendors and count the money, according to the documents. A7’s records refer to these initial cash collection points as “departments”; there are at least eight.

The brokers then pack the rubles into numbered bags. The bags are loaded into vans along with customers’ payment orders and sent to an A7 payment processing center elsewhere in Moscow. About 50 cashiers work there, recording the cash in A7’s counting system. The cash is then delivered to Promsvyazbank, which places it in a vault and credits A7’s accounts.

A7 then uses its shell companies registered abroad. Intermediary companies in Kyrgyzstan buy cryptocurrency through Grinex, a crypto exchange linked to A7. By this point, the money is no longer identified as originating in Russia, thanks to Kyrgyzstan’s permissive policies on cryptocurrency transactions.

PSB provides the banking infrastructure for transferring money to Kyrgyzstan, along with loans and guarantees when needed. From Kyrgyzstan, the money goes to intermediary companies linked to A7 in third countries, most often in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. They convert the cryptocurrency into local currencies and send the money to the end recipient.

“By the time [an A7 payment] is received, nobody in the chain, from the U.S. clearing bank to the Chinese supplier, knows where it came from,” said illicit finance expert Zachary Tvarozna, who co-authored an investigation into A7 conducted with the British nonprofit Open Source Centre. “Washington essentially created a market for A7 [by restricting legitimate transactions] and then did nothing about it,” he concluded.

The risks this scheme poses to the global financial system

From November 2024 to July 2025, A7 processed at least 283 metric tons of rubles in cash worth more than $14 billion, ICIJ and Proekt reported. The journalists were unable to trace the cash’s origins, but it is clear that most of it went to China, as before.

A registry of A7 promissory notes that leaked online and was reviewed by ICIJ shows that A7’s cash deposits at PSB rose in 2025, reaching 195 billion rubles ($2.3 billion) a month by April and 250 billion rubles ($3.1 billion) in June. At its peak, A7 processed at least 58 metric tons of cash a month.

On October 1, 2026, the U.S. Treasury Department designated A7 a “significant transnational criminal organization.” This means U.S. financial institutions will no longer be able to process transfers involving A7’s “Sub-Agents” — foreign shell companies through which the network routes payments for clients in Russia.

A7 “uses a modern, multilayered system of controls” and “was established to ensure uninterrupted payments in the Russian market, which has been subjected to unlawful restrictive measures,” the company said in a press release issued after the Treasury Department’s announcement. “All clients are screened to identify risks and prevent us from serving individuals or organizations whose activities violate regulatory requirements,” the company insisted.

Just two years earlier, when it launched, A7 presented itself as a “sanctions-proof payment system.”

George Voloshin, a financial crime expert at the Association of Certified Anti-Money Laundering Specialists, told ICIJ that A7 “not only helps Russia circumvent Western sanctions and export controls” but “is also likely to facilitate cash-based money laundering by effectively legitimizing potential proceeds of crime.”

International intermediary banks and beneficiaries effectively become complicit in these activities even though they do not know where the money comes from. The reason lies in the cash itself, Voloshin added:

The entire scheme “depends on trusted intermediaries, established relationships and confidence that money will arrive,” said Ilya Shumanov, managing partner of TriTrace Investigations, a Russian company specializing in financial market due diligence. “Its international reach can be extensive, while outsiders have limited visibility into the underlying transactions.”

According to documents reviewed by ICIJ, A7 received 314 payment requests totaling $76 million from brokers working at Sadovod in late 2024. All of the money was intended for the Hong Kong export company Yiton Trading Ltd.

A7 representatives did not respond to ICIJ’s request for comment.