(Bloomberg) -- Sanctioned Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov paid €4 million ($4.4 million) to settle a money laundering investigation by German prosecutors.
The criminal probe will be dropped after Usmanov pays €2.5 million to the government and €1.5 million to charities, Frankfurt prosecutors said in a statement on Monday. The alleged acts didn’t cause financial harm to anyone in Germany and occurred a long time ago, they said.
His lawyers, Uwe Lehmbruck and Markus Gotzens, said they had always maintained their client was innocent and he didn’t admit any guilt as part of the agreement.
“The length of this investigation – nearly two and a half years – shows that law enforcement officials had more than enough time to confirm that there were no grounds for the suspicions against him,” they said in a joint statement.
Usmanov is among the scores of Russians who were sanctioned after Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. Usmanov founded USM, a Russia-based investment group that controls Metalloinvest, Russia’s largest iron ore producer.
On top of Russian citizenship he is also an honorary citizen of Uzbekistan, where he was born. Bloomberg’s Billionaire index estimates him to be worth about $14.4 billion.
As part of the case, prosecutors two years ago raided UBS Group AG’s Frankfurt and Munich offices. Usmanov later won rulings by German courts declaring the searches and document seizures were illegal.
The Russian then sued the bank over anti-money laundering reports that he alleges triggered the criminal probe.
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