At least one bank in Bermuda has collaborated in the theft of up to $1.5 billion from Russia, according to a report in the British newspaper The Guardian.

The newspaper reports banker and politician Alexander Lebedev as saying on Thursday in London that a dozen western banks, including at least one institution in Bermuda, have collaborated in the theft from Russia since 1994.

The newspaper said he was speaking to the Royal Institute for International Affairs.

Mr. Lebedev, who is the head of Russia's seventh-largest bank, the National Reserve, is reported as saying depositors and clients of crooked banks had been robbed blind, but that western institutions had been complicit in the swindle. The report said he stated that capital flight and embezzlement had intensified since the rouble crisis of August 1998 and 34 Russian banks were deeply implicated in economic crimes of this type.

Mr. Lebedev, deputy to the former prime minister, Victor Chernomyrdin, in the conservative Our Home Russia party, said banks in Switzerland and Barbados were also involved in the covert removal of millions of dollars from Russia.

In the report Mr. Lebedev did not name the Bermudian bank he was talking about, or mention by name any other organisation.

According to analysts, Russia has failed to restructure its banking system more than a year after it nearly melted down, and regulators' tentative steps cast doubt on its future.