Austrian prosecutors are investigating hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions involving Raiffeisen Zentralbank and Diskont Bank, a Moscow bank that had its licence revoked by Russia's deputy central banker Andrei Kozlov less than two weeks before he was shot dead.

Prosecutors have disclosed the investigation was opened when Austrian police received a report on a series of suspicious transactions heading through Diskont's account at Raiffeisen, two days before Kozlov revoked its licence for suspected money laundering, a spokesman for the prosecutors' office said on Friday. Prosecutors immediately froze $4m sitting in the account in Raiffeisen.