Sunday 17th November 2024
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Comsure operates in:the UK, Jersey, Guernsey

Did the Seychelles Help Launder the “Russian Laundromat” Monies?

According to the OCCRP, 5 transactions to the value of $306,760.00 were routed through the Seychelles.

Click here to see the interactive map = http://bit.ly/2mHh5Dd

Background

Between 2010 and 2014, at least $20.8 billion was laundered out of Russia, funnelled into banks in Moldova and Latvia, and spread from there into 96 countries across the world.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which unearthed the scheme in 2014, dubbed it “the Russian Laundromat.”  Its main beneficiaries have not been named (though former Moldovan MP Vyacheslav Platon has been arrested for allegedly orchestrating it).

However, now The Guardian and other outlets are reporting that a lot—an awful lot—of international banks ended up as hosts for the money, despite their anti-money-laundering controls. The data, the Guardian says, come from evidence collected in a police investigation and provided by the OCCRP.

Under the scheme, 21 shell companies with hidden owners were set up in the UK, Cyprus and New Zealand.

One company would then create a fake “loan” to another company, and a Russian firm would guarantee the loan. The shell companies would then default on the fake “loan,” and a corrupt Moldovan judge would “authenticate” the fake debt, ordering the Russian debtor to make the repayment into a Moldovan court bank account. The Russian debtor could then get the money out of the country and launder it through a host of banks throughout the world—usually going first via Trasta Komercbanka in Latvia.

There’s a nice graphic explaining this from OCCRP:

 


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