AKIPRESS.COM - The son of a former Kazakh politician accused of embezzling state assets used hundreds of accounts for encrypted emails to hide talks about real-estate dealings in the U.S. while facing a money-laundering suit involving a purchase of condos in the luxury Trump Soho tower, according to a bank seeking to recover billions of dollars it claims were stolen, Bloomberg reports.

Ilyas Khrapunov, who’s living in Switzerland to avoid arrest in Kazakhstan, also ignored U.S. court rules requiring the preservation of evidence when litigation is looming by deleting accounts and failing to produce documents about his real-estate deals, Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank JSC told the Manhattan federal court on Tuesday. The bank also claims he hid the location of a key witness in the case, who was eventually located in California and deposed.

It’s the latest twist in a years long dispute rooted in claims that Khrapunov’s father, Viktor, stole $300 million from the City of Almaty while he was mayor and that a close associate, former BTA Bank Chairman Mukhtar Ablyazov, embezzled $4 billion from the company. The bank accuses the trio of using real-estate projects in Europe and the U.S., including three units at the Trump Soho, to launder $440 million as authorities were probing the alleged thefts.

“Ilyas was living under a constant threat of litigation, on many fronts, from at least 2010 into 2014,” BTA Bank said in a court filing outlining its claim. “Nevertheless, even when faced with actual litigation by the Kazakh entities, he ignored his preservation obligations and instead destroyed the many records” controlled by him and by the investment company he founded for the real-estate investments, Triadou SPV SA, the bank said.

BTA Bank was Kazakhstan’s biggest lender before it defaulted on $12 billion of debt in 2009. It accused Ablyazov of embezzling billions of dollars’ worth of mines, hotels, shopping centers and other assets in the former Soviet bloc country between 2005 and 2009. Ablyazov, who claims the allegations against him are politically motivated, fled the country before he could be arrested.