Russia’s missing billions revealed
Russia’s central bank governor has lifted the lid on $49bn in illegal capital flight last year – more than half of which, he says, was controlled “by one well-organised group of individuals” that he declined to name.
Sergei Ignatiev, due to step down in June after 11 years in his post, is seldom outspoken about any issue other than interest rates. But he unburdened himself in an interview with the Moscow newspaper Vedomosti about money leaving the country through the back door, which he said equalled 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product last year.
“This might be payment for supplies of narcotics . . . illegal imports . . . bribes and kickbacks for bureaucrats . . . and avoiding taxes,” he told the daily, which is part-owned by the Financial Times.
Russia’s central bank has access to daily monitoring data on all payments within the commercial banking system, and Mr Ignatiev said the $49bn figure was mainly drawn from analysing “payments made by Russian organisations to non-residents, the stated aims of which are clearly false”.
He added: “Apart from this, our analysis shows that more than half of the total of shady operations is conducted by firms directly or indirectly linked to each other by payments. The impression is created that they are all controlled by one well-organised group of individuals.”
Mr Ignatiev also drew attention to the prevalence of what is known in Russian as “one-day firms”, which operate as conduits for money transfers and then vanish before they pay taxes. He estimated that half of the 3.9m registered commercial organisations in Russia were inactive and “waiting for their hour to come”.
A Moscow-based economist, who asked not to be identified, said the schemes described by Mr Ignatiev were exactly those being investigated now in several jurisdictions in connection with the case of the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in police custody in 2009 after he attempted to track a fraudulent tax refund that appeared to benefit a group of bankers and law enforcement officers.
“What Magnitsky was looking into – that was the tip of the iceberg,” the economist said.
Igor Yurgens, a former adviser to Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, said that if what Mr Ignatiev said about a “single organised group” was true, “such an operation would not be possible without serious support from law enforcement”.
Mr Ignatiev appeared to allude to somewhat lacklustre efforts by Russia’s law enforcement agencies at tackling the problem, saying: “In the event of a serious concentration of effort by the . . . agencies, I think such people, and the beneficiaries of such operations, could be found.”
Sergei Aleksashenko, a former first deputy central bank governor from 1995-98, said the capital flight schemes spoken about by Mr Ignatiev could be deduced from the daily commercial banking data. He said: “It is easy to spot if you know what to look for.”
However, he pointed out, excessive diligence in bank supervision was hazardous to one’s health in Russia. Mr Ignatiev’s former deputy in charge of bank supervision, Andrei Kozlov, was shot dead in 2006 after launching a crusade to clean up the banking sector, revoking the licences of several banks. The head of a private bank, closed by Mr Kozlov for violating money laundering regulations, was convicted two years ago of ordering his murder.
Mr Kozlov’s successor, Gennady Melikyan, deputy governor of the central bank in charge of bank supervision, resigned for unclear reasons in September 2011.
Acquaintances of Mr Ignatiev found his public revelations remarkable, adding that his decision to unburden himself about high-level corruption was probably connected with his forthcoming exit.
“He usually doesn’t make big public statements unrelated to monetary policy,” said Sergei Guriev, rector of the New Economic School in Moscow, who serves on the board of state-owned Sberbank together with Mr Ignatiev.
“He is a very intelligent person of high integrity, and in closed-door meetings he is always very straight. Probably, he just believes that central bankers should not speak too much in public.”
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Mr. Ignatiev’s candor in the world’s democracies would be praised. Unfortunately, he’s in a culture where the candor is likely to significantly shorten his lifespan. For the last eleven years my business partner & I learned firsthand by declining a 100 % funding offer with a “wrapper” of the Russian government that Russia’s greater export than energy is murder & mayhem. Whereas we initially were closely watching the climate in Russia, far more than our greatest fears have been realized as to what Russia is all about. Through example we have learned the hard lesson that Russia is a hotbed of terror. All I have known the last 11 years standing on US soil is how much money a Kremlin controlled by Putin throws behind illegals to embed as neighbors whose sole job it is to ruin my life. I’ve become over the last 11 years expert identifying that all Russia has to offer the rest of the world is murder & mayhem. Russia under Putin has no redeeming qualities! My business partner& I learned the dragging of our feet with the 100 % financing offer was a wise decision.
At the time the 100 % financing offer first was made already there was trouble with Yukos. The offer alerted my business partner and I to the need to evaluate Russia’s business climate. This is the short list of what I learned about Russia during the evaluation: Its illegals break into your home and rape you. Its illegals break into your home and let police officers rape you to later blackmail them. Its illegals bribe police officers. Between the blackmail and bribes of cops the illegals orchestrate illicit incarcerations (I’ve endured 45 days of those)and have cops attempt to stage sudden death heart attack assassinations. Russia’s illegals break into your home and sodomize you with HIV at the end of the stick hoping to make you contract HIV. Russia under Putin was behind the murder of 2 of my grandparents, my mother’s sister, a friend and my baby brother is one-step from being wheelchair bound because the hit on him failed. Putin’s illegals turn your open liquid containers in the frig into dirty bombs. The Kremlin’s illegals carve-out your home’s foundation to steal natural gas from the gas pipe running beneath it. Its illegals wire directly into your circuit breaker box and fry all your new interior lines leaving intact only enough lines to sustain their electricity theft. The Kremlin’s illegals make false allegation upon false allegation. Whereas it is a felony for them to file a defamation lawsuit against me using their false aliases, I’m winding up to bring suit against the brood of them. Putin’s illegals released radon gas into my home to turn it into a dirty bomb, and released other deadly toxins into the house. When I finally was able to secure the house better, Putin’s illegals began drilling holes into my house to release the deadly gases. I’d patch a hole with cement and within days I was patching a new one in the same vicinity. There have been multiple arson attempts by Putin’s illegals. They last fall kept opening the gas line running along a property line trying to blow-up the block including themselves like suicide bombers. They’ve tried to set my home aflame using a kerosene tiki lamp. Putin’s illegals are as narcissitic as he is! This is the real Russia!
More: My front lawn has been turned into a toxic waste dump. I was surrounded by 14 angels wearing cloaks of fur that were murdered by Putin’s illegals. Only a month ago another dog was murdered. People that murder angels spend their next life in hell!
Even more: I’ve had radiation stuck in my saline solution to force me to wear glasses, as well as in all other toiletries so that sunblock made me burn, hair conditioner froze my hair with radiation isotopes, toothpaste gave me oral cancer to burnt-off with ascorbic acid, etc. The illegals murdered one of my neighbors for sport. My prescription sunglasses were swiped & I then exposed to a novachok agent that was to make me fall asleep behind the steering wheel when my optic nerve was exposed to sunlight. That was 6 years after 3 staged car accidents in 3 months failed to yield the Kremlin’s desired results.THIS IS THE REAL RUSSIA AS PUTIN WANTS! THIS ISN’T A RUSSIA THAT ANYONE IN THE WORLD WANTS A RELATIONSHIP WITH!
Each time a family member or fur angel was murdered with the exception of the last murder because I caught the drugs, I was drugged into the worst chemically depressed state. People in animal rescue don’t commit suicide. We have too many animals depending on us to save them from euthanasia needles, so no matter how bad a dose we get of the drugs we don’t take our own lives. I also got a massive exposure to the novachok agent that gives you the worst of fungal infections if a polyester tag rubs against the nerve cluster connected to the cerebral cortex.
The fungal infection was given to me during cold wintry months making it impossible to be naturally occurring. The hit on my grandmother approximately 8 hours before Politkovskaya was muted also was very “revealing! The HIV attempt was done during a long period of celibacy making it easily traceable to Putin’s local ring leader using an alias of Andrea Meyer. SP-17 doesn’t work on people that take probiotics. They remember everything! Add two additional supplements & SP-17 impacts people none in the slightest. I remember everything Andrea Meyer & co-conspirators did to me. I know very well the real Russia under the control of a violent street thug named Vladmir Putin!