Two named banks account for $2.9bn of the $6.9bn A7 moved through SWIFT-connected accounts

Add the two flows the leaked files attach to a named institution and the total is $2.9 billion, about 42 per cent of the $6.9 billion ^[1][2]. Treat that as a ceiling. The $1.1 billion arrived in Standard Chartered accounts in Hong Kong and the $1.8 billion left First Abu Dhabi Bank, so a dollar that travelled from one to the other appears in both counts ^[10][11]. The FT did not report volumes for flows through clients of DBS in Hong Kong, Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, or for the accounts A7-linked vehicles used at JPMorgan ^[12][13]. By subtraction, roughly $4 billion of the total sits outside the two disclosed numbers ^[3].

Spread across roughly 100 front companies, $6.9 billion averages about $69 million each ^[4]. At First Abu Dhabi Bank the concentration is tighter, with 17 entities sending more than $1.8 billion, or upwards of $106 million apiece ^[11][5]. The screening that failed was documentary. When compliance teams questioned transfers, A7 staff allegedly generated counterfeit invoices and supporting paperwork on an industrial scale, and altered transaction descriptions and customs codes so that restricted goods appeared to be ordinary commercial items ^[8].

The design of the network helps explain why that was enough. SWIFT generally depends on the originating bank to verify its own customers instead of independently checking every beneficiary, and once A7-linked entities had cleared those initial controls the money moved onward through correspondent banks ^[9]. Some of the payments appear connected to purchases by Russian security services and military-related entities ^[14].

The Standard Chartered window is the one with dates on it. If late 2024 means December, $1.1 billion through August 2025 runs at about $122 million a month across nine months ^[10][6].

First Abu Dhabi Bank said it had already identified and closed the relevant accounts ^[16]. Several banks named in the investigation said they take anti-money-laundering and sanctions obligations seriously, and others declined to discuss individual cases while pointing to existing controls ^[15].

From here, the cheap outcome is that remediation amounts to a handful of account closures and a paragraph in a compliance report. A harder one is that the files become an evidentiary base for enforcement against a correspondent bank. Such a case would reprice trade accounts held in Kyrgyzstan, the UAE, Hong Kong and Hungary ^[6]. The hardest is wholesale exit from those four corridors, in which case legitimate importers there lose access or pay more. In my view the second and third arrive together: exiting an account is cheaper than checking customs codes against physical goods, and First Abu Dhabi Bank has already closed the ones it found ^[16]. What would break that view is a bank record showing the accounts were reported and shut before the files leaked. That record would make this a story about slow controls instead of missing ones.