A London payments firm authorized by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) appeared on an internal roster of channels that the Kremlin-linked network A7 said it could use to move money, according to documents from a large leak examined by the FT.
The company, trading as Wooshpay and incorporated as Swooshtransfer, holds FCA permission as a small payment institution.
That status obliges it to identify customers and their beneficial owners, establish why a business relationship exists, and watch the transactions that pass through it. An internal A7 briefing described the firm as holding an “extensive licence” and listed it as a possible route for payments into mainland China and Hong Kong, in both renminbi and dollars.
A7 is the cross-border payments operation built to help Russian importers settle bills abroad after Western sanctions cut many Russian banks off from ordinary correspondent banking following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Last week the US Treasury designated the network a transnational criminal organisation.
That step came shortly after the FT reported that A7 had pushed about $6.9 billion through conventional banks by using hundreds of front companies and an industrial forgery operation that manufactured supporting paperwork.
One file in the leak shows how A7 tried to invent a commercial explanation for its link to Wooshpay.
Staff produced a forged invoice that cast the London firm as a supplier of “cashmere sewing fabric” to the network.
The same cache records the conditions A7 attached to the route: daily payments were not to exceed $50,000, and a customs declaration containing no Russian language was required before a transfer would be approved.
The FT identified a single payment on this channel, a transfer of 189,000 renminbi, about $26,000.
The reference number attached to it in A7’s records indicated that Wooshpay was sending money onward for the network, rather than simply receiving funds as a supplier.
Public filings list the firm as ultimately controlled by a Chinese national living in China.
A second director is recorded at Companies House as resident in the United Kingdom.The finding extends an investigation that has already traced A7’s footprint through major international banks.
Earlier reporting, based on hundreds of thousands of internal files, described how the group—originally set up in Russia and Kyrgyzstan by the fugitive Moldovan oligarch Ilan Shor, with backing from the state-linked Promsvyazbank—disguised payments as ordinary trade.
Front companies in places such as the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong, Kyrgyzstan and Indonesia held the accounts.
Forged invoices supplied the cover story when banks asked what the money was for. Some of the flows related to sensitive goods connected to the war.
US officials have since gone further.
On 1 October the Treasury, under an operation it called Economic Outcast, sanctioned A7 as a significant transnational criminal organisation and accused the network of also serving Iranian actors and their proxies.
The Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network proposed a rule that would bar US institutions from transmitting funds involving A7-controlled foreign “sub-agents,” the third-country companies that sign the paperwork and appear as the paying party.
FinCEN has said those sub-agents processed more than $17 billion between January 2025 and June 2026, and that A7 itself has claimed a far larger volume of activity.
The London example is small beside those totals. What it illustrates is the reach of the method: a firm registered with a major Western supervisor, and therefore expected to know its customers and the purpose of their payments, was written into A7’s own list of usable routes, complete with a fabricated trade in sewing fabric and a daily cap designed to keep individual transfers modest.
Whether the FCA-authorized firm knew how it was being described inside the network is not settled by the documents the FT has published so far. The records do show that A7 treated an authorised British payments business as part of the machinery built to keep Russian trade moving after sanctions.