A group of investigative journalists uncovered a $9 billion money laundering scam rooted from Russia’s largest private bank and unsurprisingly, it doesn’t involve Bitcoin.
The scheme, which enabled perpetrators to funnel billions from shell companies to the global banking system, was exposed by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) with assistance from the Guardian and Lithuanian news site 15min.lt.
The journalists revealed that Troika facilitated “$470 billion in 1.3 million leaked transactions from 233,000 companies,” which led them to refer the money laundering operation as “The Troika Laundromat.” Between 2013 and 2016, the Laundromat funneled about $4.8 billion into the US and Europe via at least 75 interconnected offshore companies. These companies were allegedly owned by wealthy Russian politicians and oligarchs – some with direct links to president Vladimir Putin.
“The Laundromat allowed Russian oligarchs and politicians to secretly acquire shares in state-owned companies, to buy real estate both in Russia and abroad, to purchase luxury yachts, to hire music superstars for private parties, to pay medical bills, and much more,” OCCRP revealed.
The network of offshore companies generated $8.8 billion worth of unreported transactions to cover the cash’s origins, the report noted, adding:
“To protect themselves, the wealthy people behind this system used the identities of poor people as unwitting signatories in the secretive offshore companies that ran the system.”
Since 2017, several multi-billion dollar money laundering schemes involving major bank have been uncovered. Yet, the focus of regulators still seem to be
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