Swiss banking is notoriously secretive. Sometimes, even the names on accounts opened in Swiss banks don’t reflect their real owners. How can Nina Minasyan’s whopping 106 million Swiss francs be explained?

Nina Minasyan, a citizen of Armenia, was only 14 years old in 1997 when a bank account was opened for her in Switzerland. By 2013, her account contained millions of Swiss francs. 

Minasyan’s employment history, lack of business background and family circumstances provide no clues as to how she could have amassed such funds — raising the question of who the money belongs to and whether the real owner is using her name to hide them.

Information about Minasyan’s account was contained in a leak of banking data from Credit Suisse, the prominent Swiss lender where it was held. The data was provided to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung by an anonymous source and shared with Hetq as part of the Suisse Secrets cross-border journalistic investigation. The project focused on dubious figures from around the world — including criminals, former officials and oligarchs — who have exploited Swiss banking secrecy to stash their millions in the country’s banks.

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But, as our investigation demonstrates, not every large account was linked to a famous name.

Registering businesses, opening offshore and bank accounts via the names of proxies is one of many ways to hide wealth. Various Armenian officials and oligarchs have used this method - nominally they would not have any connection to a given business or large sum of money, but in reality would be the true owners.

While  we did not find any substantial evidence that Minasyan played the role of a proxy, the unexplained nature of her enormous wealth raises the question of whether her name was on the account as a cover for someone else. For a developing country like Armenia, where many experience economic hardships and income inequality, such unexplained wealth becomes a question of public interest.

Minasyan’s date of birth appears in the banking data along with her name, enabling reporters to use residence records to track her down in Armenia. There is only one person with that last name and date of birth in the country. 

The family apartment in Yerevan, where Nina Minasyan is registered along with her parents and brother,  is unoccupied, and neighbors told reporters that they were in Moscow.

Nina herself now lives in Bern, Switzerland, where she works for a telecommunications company called Comfone. Months ago, when Hetq started the investigation, a photo of Minasyan and a short interview with her in which she talked about moving to Switzerland was posted on the company’s website. This information was later removed.

On LinkedIn, Minasyan still lists her previous Armenian employer, the cell phone operator VivaCell-MTS. However the company representative told us Minasyan is no longer an employee there.

Minasyan was initially contacted by Süddeutsche Zeitung via LinkedIn. She agreed to answer our questions about the source of her millions and asked that they be sent in writing. On January 26 of this year, our partner sent the questions. She never responded.

Hetq then telephoned her current employer, Comfone, and asked to be connected to Minasyan. The operator said that she did not want to talk to us, adding that she wanted us to send any questions via email.

We did so, emailing her several times over the course of a month but received no reply. Minasyan even blocked our e-mails so we could not contact her any more.

Meanwhile, reporters looked into her family, finding no evidence of independent wealth.

One of the neighbors in their building told Hetq that they sometimes drank coffee with her mother, Tsoghik Zakaryan. She was surprised to learn that Nina was in Switzerland. She said that Tsoghik had come to their house so often but had never said that her daughter lived in Switzerland.

Tsoghik Zakaryan worked for Armenia’s State Property Management Committee for 22 years. She headed the committee's internal audit department until 2021. Employees Hetq spoke to said she didn’t have many friends there. Zakaryan quit her job in 2021 and none of the staff had any information on her afterwards.

In Yerevan, we also found Nina Minasyan's uncle, Tigran Zakaryan. He was surprised that Nina has so much money. He said that he couldn’t believe it given her background. He said he had no contact with Nina, and rarely communicated with Tsoghik.

Nina Minasyan's father, Sanasar Minasyan, is a migrant worker employed as a driver in Moscow. According to our information, Nina's brother Sargis Minasyan is unemployed.

On April 3, we received a message from Tsoghik Zakaryan asking us to contact her. We called her Russian number. Nina's mother was aware that we had met her brother and neighbor.

Tsoghik Zakaryan, by telephone, told Hetq that her daughter doesn’t have much money in the bank and that our information about her account was incorrect. Minasyan's brother Sargis, who also took part in the conversation, said that his sister never replied fearing our emails were an attempt to hack her accounts.

We asked to speak to Minasyan in person or at least for her to reply to our emails. A few days later, she contacted our German colleague via LinkedIn.

Minasyan reiterated that our information is incorrect and that she has no connection with those millions of Swiss Francs.

Read her answer in English here.

Hetq also sent a request to Credit Suisse, asking if they had checked the source of Nina Minasyan's money. The bank gave its standard answer: when opening an account, they conduct due diligence checks, and the rest is a bank secret.

Nina Minasyan was probably aware of our inquiry to the bank, and it’s possible she contacted the bank. The bank knows that the leaked data does not contain everything that Minasyan demanded from us in her response. It is obvious that Nina answered our questions after consulting with the bank and, possibly, with lawyers as well.

It should be noted that the Credit Suisse investigation has caused a stir in Switzerland and has been the number one topic of discussion for some time. We believe the bank has advised its customers on how to answer journalists’ inquiries.

We also sent a request to the Central Bank of Armenia (CBA), noting that there is a large amount of money in the bank account of Nina Minasyan, a citizen of Armenia, in Credit Suisse. We noted our suspicions that the account may have been opened for money laundering. We asked if there were any transfers from Armenian banks to Nina Minasyan's Swiss bank account or had Nina Minasyan made transfers from Swiss banks to Armenian banks.

The CBA responded that the requested information was a banking secret. We knew this beforehand, but our investigation suggests that Nina Minasyan couldn’t have amassed such a large amount of money via normal avenues.

In this case, the CBA’s Financial Monitoring Center (FMC) should check the information provided and if it finds reasonable doubts, it should submit the matter to law enforcement.

The FMC does not report its findings to other government bodies.

As we’ve mentioned, according to our data, the Credit Suisse bank account in Nina Minasyan’s name was opened in 1997. She was a minor at the time. Whether the account was opened by her parents or a legal entity authorized by them is unclear.

Her mother, Tsoghik Zakaryan, was then working for the Central Bank of Armenia (1996-1997).

Nina Minasyan and her mother deny that any bank account in Nina's name was opened in 1997 and claim that she does not have so much money.

Finally, according to the information leaked from the Swiss bank, Nina Minasyan spent about 25 million francs from the account during 2013-2016.

Where the money came from remains a mystery.