Recently The Guardian reported that some 740 million dollars were shifted out of Russia through British banks in a vast money-laundering operation run by Russian criminals with links to the Russian government and the FSB.
THE INVESTIGATION
The money laundering happened in terms of international scheme called “The Global Laundromat.” The material is based on the investigation of international organization of journalists from Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Novaya Gazeta and Sueddeutsche Zeitung. They have been investigating the scheme for 3 years.
Earlier the same journalists helped to find in offshore companies secret bank accounts which are known as “Panama papers.”
HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds, and Barclays are among 17 banks in the scheme based in the UK.
THE SHADOW OF PUTIN
The documents seen by The Guardian show that at least 20 billion dollars appear to have been moved out of Russia during a four-year period between 2010 and 2014. The true amount could easily be 80 billion dollars.
Detectives estimate a group of about 500 people who were involved in the scheme. These include oligarchs, Moscow bankers, figures working for or connected to the FSB, the successor spy agency to the KGB and also Igor Putin. The last one is a cousin of Russian president. He was in a council of one of the Russian banks under investigation of money laundering.
The data which The Guardian has got is also based on another three-year-long investigation led by police in Latvia and Moldova.
Detectives said that billions of dollars had been sent from suspected criminals in Russia via accounts in Moldova to Latvia and then to other countries of European Union including Britain.
BANKS’ ANSWERS
British banks have already answered about money laundering and their role in the scheme.
HSBC: “We are strongly committed to fighting financial crime. The bank has systems and processes in place to identify suspicious activity and report it to the appropriate government authorities. This case highlights the need for greater information sharing between the public and private sectors.”
Royal Bank of Scotland: “We are committed to combating financial crime and money laundering in line with our regulations and have controls and safeguards in place to identify, assess, monitor and mitigate these risks.”
Lloyds/Bank of Scotland: “We do not comment on individual customers. We have effective processes in place to check the identity of customers as well as various tools to help identify suspicious activity. Where we identify any potential money-laundering activity we advise the relevant authorities in line with our legal and regulatory obligations.”
Despite the fact that all banks guaranteed the safety of their banking systems which could find any illegal money, according to investigation they let pass at least 738 million dollars through their accounts.
Previously, Duncan Hames, policy director at Transparency International UK, a non-profit organization that monitors corruption, said about dropping of investor’s applications: “Just 215 wealthy people were granted an investor visa for the UK in 2016 after the government doubled the investment needed to 2 million pounds ($2.5 million) and introduced new money-laundering checks in 2014. The most persuasive explanation is that ‘tighter wealth checks’ have scared off those with something to hide.”
Nevertheless, we can see that new money-laundering checks didn’t stop a lot of post-Soviet oligarchs to send their money to Britain.
WHO WAS BEHIND THE LAUNDROMAT?
One of its alleged architects was Vyacheslav Platon, a Moldovan businessman and former member of parliament. Platon denies wrongdoing. Now he is in jail in Moldova on money-laundering charges.
Another alleged ringleader is Alexander Grigoriev, a 49-year-old Russian banker. Grigoriev was detained in November 2015. He has denied wrongdoing and is still in custody.
Money from the state-owned Russian Railways also appears to have been laundered this way. Vladimir Putin’s longstanding ally Vladimir Yakunin was in charge of the railways when the Laundromat scheme was underway.
Moldovan investigators believe the Kremlin may have used Laundromat cash for covert political operations. In particular, they think the money could have helped support anti-EU parties.
There is little hard proof but at least one bank caught up in the Laundromat is the First Czech-Russian bank, which in 2009, before Laundromat was set up, was mired in controversy when it loaned about 9 million euros to Marine Le Pen’s National Front party.
“Money laundering is the biggest business in Russia. At first, you steal from the budget. You’ve got this dirty money. You have to do something with it. The whole Russian economy is dying. Bribes are the biggest part of it. People who provide money-laundering services have a lot of political influence,” a former Moscow banker, now living in exile, explained.
Those familiar with this world say a scheme like Laundromat could only function with support from the top.
WHAT IS GOING TO BE NEXT?
Britain wants to stop the flow of potentially illegal money from Russia into their country.
In interview to The Guardian the head of the National Crime Agency money laundering unit, David Little, said: “The amount of Russian money coming into the UK is a concern. One, because of the volume. Two, we don’t know where it is coming from. We don’t have enough cooperation [from the Russian side] to establish that. They won’t tell us whether it comes from the proceeds of crime.”
According to the law, now the British parliament has to initiate a special open hearing. The government’s representatives must be there and response about money laundering in Britain.
