Both BNY Mellon and Clearstream declined to comment.

VimpelCom is in talks with U.S. authorities to pay about $775 million to settle the allegations, according to three people familiar with the matter. That would be the second- largest fine ever levied under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans bribing officials to win business. U.S. officials declined to comment.

The U.S. complaint details numerous schemes VimpelCom and MTS allegedly used to bribe Karimova. In 2011, for example, VimpelCom’s Uzbek unit paid $30 million to a Gibraltar company Karimova controlled, Takilant Ltd., for consulting work that included reports copied and pasted from Wikipedia, blogs and VimpelCom’s own research, according to the complaint. The unit was awarded a coveted 4G license at about this time.

A man who answered the phone at Gibraltar’s corporate registrar last week said Takilant’s company secretary is listed as Form-a-Co Ltd. A man who answered Form-a-Co’s phone declined to comment or provide an alternative contact for Takilant.


Geneva Mansion


In Switzerland, where Karimova once lived in a Geneva mansion, prosecutors have widened their own probe into suspected money-laundering and fraud offenses related to her role in awarding telecommunications contracts in Uzbekistan. In August, they said they’d confiscated more than 800 million Swiss francs ($781 million) of assets linked to her, without elaborating, bringing the total amount seized to about $1.1 billion.

Add the $900 million VimpelCom has set aside for potential liabilities and the amount tied up in the investigations is pushing $2 billion. And that’s not even counting the impact on the market values of VimpelCom, MTS and TeliaSonera or the future costs of litigation.

VimpelCom’s market value has plunged 59 percent to $6.3 billion since March 12, 2014, when it disclosed the U.S. and Dutch probes, even after rallying 6.8 percent on Wednesday after Bloomberg News reported it was close to reaching a settlement. The American receipts of MTS and TeliaSonera have fallen 52 percent and 38 percent in the same period, cutting their values to $7.9 billion and $20.2 billion, respectively.


‘Go-to Person’


There were millions of reasons mobile operators were eager to break into Uzbekistan in the 2000s. In 2005, when cellular service was still a luxury, the country had just 917,000 users. Now it has 21 million, the most in Central Asia by far, according the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.