Zoah Hedges-Stocks investigates Trinity Hall’s latest investment and its links to alleged Russian criminal activity for The Cambridge Student:

The Cambridge Student can exclusively reveal the tangled web that links Trinity Hall to the Russian Mafia.

Trinity Hall has joined forces with Cambridge County Council to buy Leicestershire-based The Pensions Bank, and turn it into the Cambridge & Counties Bank. This new bank, which opened on Monday 11th June, will invest council workers’ pensions, and lend money to local businesses with a turnover of under £25 million.

On the face of it, this seems like a less than newsworthy activity on Trinity Hall’s part. Cambridge colleges regularly come under fire for investment in ethically dubious sectors such as the arms trade, but putting money into a small bank which will benefit smaller local businesses, and, hopefully, local council workers, seems an uncontroversial venture. It will create 17 new jobs, and aims to lend £100 million to small businesses over the next two years. It is a positively rosy endeavour.

However, the man who, as a major shareholder, sold the bank to Trinity Hall is none other than the rather infamous Vladimir Aleksandrovich Antonov.

He may be familiar to some readers as the former owner of Portsmouth Football Club. He is a Russian entrepreneur who was born in Uzbekistan in 1975, currently lives in England, is fighting extradition to Lithuania, has business interests across the globe and is surrounded by persistent rumours of criminal activity…

Full story here.