Posts Tagged ‘cyprus’
Latvia: the Next Cyprus?
Earlier this month, EU finance ministers gave their approval for Latvia to become the eighteenth member of the Euro in January 2014. It seems counterintuitive that the country of two million people would want to enter the perpetually distressed and recession-stricken economic zone. But for Latvia it has a variety of benefits, not the least of which would be to allow its impressive financial sector easy and unfiltered access to the rest of the continent. The hope is that by embracing the euro and committing itself to the necessary structural preconditions for acceptance, that Latvia will see economic growth and avoid events like the massive drop in GDP it experienced after the 2008 global economic crisis.
Latvia joining the euro, taken by itself, would seem at the very least uninteresting to most observers and politicians sitting in Brussels and Washington D.C. But there is a more worrisome aspect that troubles those very same politicians and portends an economic crisis on the scale of Cyprus if it is not carefully addressed. That nefarious aspect is the country being used as an entry point for illicit Russian money seeking to enter the EU.
The concern over Latvia entering the EU is in part due to the striking similarities between the Cyprus and Latvia. Like Cyprus, Latvia has an oversized financial sector compared to its population, which it has made the centerpiece of its economy. Both countries have strikingly low corporate tax rates, with Latvia at 15 percent and Cyprus at 12.5 percent (the Euro average is 23.5 percent). Additionally, a majority of the services in these nations cater to foreign clients, particularly Russian clients—or from former Soviet states in Central Asia—hoping to escape the capricious and unstable legal and economic situations inside of their country. (More often they are simply hoping to move their money from the watchful eye of Rosfinmonitoring—Putin’s personal financial-intelligence-collection unit). But making Latvia even more dependent on Russian money is the fact that nonresidents account for 48.9 percent of deposits, compared to 43 percent in Switzerland (the perennial tax-cheat haven) and 37 percent in Cyprus. Since 2010 nonresident deposits have increased 32 percent (According to the Latvian central bank, foreign direct investment from Russia has increased from 268.6 million euros in 2010 to 356 million euros today). These statistics are especially troubling considering that in 2008 one of Latvia’s largest banks, Parex, was forced to seek a government bailout due to worried investors withdrawing over $120 million in November alone. Situations like Parex forced Latvia to seek a bailout.
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Latvia – like a Virgin island
If you’ve ever wondered what sort of tax dodges they get up to in the British Virgin Islands, take a trip to Latvia and speak with Kristaps Zakulis, chairman of the country’s financial regulator, the Financial and Capital Markets Commission (FKTK). Zakulis displays impressive knowledge of and enthusiasm for talking about the Caribbean archipelago whenever Latvia’s own offshoring industry is mentioned.
During the course of an interview lasting less than an hour, he racks up a couple of dozen uses of the words “British Virgin Islands”, “former British colony” and “John Smith” – all the more impressive when the conversation was supposed to be about his agency’s investigation into the links between Latvian banks and the notorious Magnitsky affair in Russia.
The annoyance Zakulis expresses over anything bearing a Union Flag was clearly supposed to provoke your correspondent into a fit of patriotic indignation, yet never having been to the Caribbean archipelago or of a high enough net worth to open any tax-efficient account more impressive than a Post Office savings book, it was a wasted expenditure of energy.
But Zakulis’ probable point is that whatever is happening in Latvia is happening elsewhere too – which is certainly true as far as offshoring goes. To an extent the point could also be applied to the Magnitsky case, as banks in Moldova, Lithuania, Estonia and Cyprus holding accounts from the UK, Belize and – you guessed it, the British Virgin Islands – have been named by lawyers representing Hermitage Capital Management of laundering $230m in the case that led to the death in detention of their lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. According to the lawyers, around $63m of that total was laundered via six Latvian banks in 2007 and last year, Hermitage filed a complaint in Riga demanding the authorities look into its allegations.
Latvia’s Economic Police initially seemed disinterested, but did eventually open an investigation that is ongoing though yet to bring any criminal charges.
To its credit, FKTK was much more active in conducting an investigation and even found one bank culpable enough to impose the maximum fine it is allowed by law, LVL100,000 (€142,000). But the Magnitsky case has a way of making everyone it touches look absurd, from the ridiculous contradictory accounts of how the lawyer met his death in the first place to his ludicrous posthumous conviction pushed by the Kremlin. The Latvian connection does not disappoint in this regard either, for FKTK refuses to say not only when the fine was imposed, but even the name of the bank that is supposed to pay it.
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EU ministers to debate Cyprus money laundering report
An EU-mandated report on money laundering in Cyprus contains nothing shocking, sources say. But you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the level of secrecy.
The report was drafted by Moneyval, a branch of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, and an Italian unit of Deloitte Financial Advisory, a US-based accountancy firm.
Moneyval interviewed people at Cypriot government institutions to see how they implement international standards.
EUobserver understands that Deloitte audited a sample of Cypriot banks, but not Cyprus-based branches of foreign banks, to see how private firms do it.
One EU source familiar with the content told EUobserver: “They discovered much less [wrongdoing] than people expected.”
Another EU source said: “It’s not as bad as many people thought it would be.”
But in fact, expectations were quite low.
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The yoga guru and the British firms at the heart of Sergei Magnitsky’s death
To her students Lana Zamba is simply an experienced yoga teacher, expert in a 500-year-old form of the mystic Eastern discipline. But Mrs Zamba is equally pliable, it appears, when it comes to choosing business directorships.
The yoga instructor, who lives in Limassol in Cyprus, has been a director of no fewer than 24 British-based companies including one at the centre of an alleged multi-million-pound fraud uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, the Moscow lawyer whose death in a Russian jail became an international cause célèbre.
Quite why a yoga instructor, who describes herself on the internet as “the leading teacher and representative of the Patanjali International Yoga Foundation”, should head so many different businesses is unclear.
But Mrs Zamba, 47, is named in a series of letters sent to authorities demanding a criminal investigation in Britain into a fraud that led to Mr Magnitsky’s death.
Mr Magnitsky, 37, who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, a British-based hedge fund, had uncovered evidence of a £150 million fraud committed by Russian tax officials and an organised crime syndicate.
He was then arrested on tax evasion charges and held in the notorious Butyrka prison for 358 days before his death in 2009, developing pancreatitis for which he did not receive proper medical treatment. He was also beaten in jail.
Despite being dead for four years – and to the anger of the outside world – Mr Magnitsky is being tried posthumously in Moscow for tax evasion.
Hermitage’s investigations into the fraud suggest as much as £35 million was laundered through 10 British companies. One of those companies – Nomirex Trading Ltd, based in an office block in Birmingham – lists only two directors: Mrs Zamba and a company based in Cyprus.
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EU audit on Cyprus money laundering – whitewash in the making?
EU Observer
Auditors on an EU-sponsored mission to see if Cypriot banks launder money for Russian criminals began work last Wednesday (20 March).
The project has slipped out of view amid dramatic talks on Cyprus’ new bailout.
But it is likely to come back with a vengeance when the Dutch, Finnish and German parliaments vote in April on whether the EU should lend Cyprus the €10 billion it needs.
The German government pushed for the probe in the first place because the Social-Democrat opposition threatened to veto a Cypriot rescue on money laundering grounds.
“This is a matter of concern … for public opinion in several of our member states,” European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso noted on Monday.
There are two units supposed to do the job.
One is Moneyval, a specialist branch of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, whose top man, John Ringguth, a former British prosecutor, was in Nicosia last week to kick things off.
The other is a “private international audit firm” to be hired by Cyprus’ central bank.
The auditors’ terms of reference (what powers they have, which banks they will check) are “confidential,” to use the phrase of one German official.
Moneyval told EUobserver its task is to “focus exclusively on the effectiveness of Customer Due Diligence (CDD) measures in the [Cypriot] banking sector.” In other words, to see if banks check who their customers really are.
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The New Russian Mob
I realize this is a somewhat irresponsible thought, but I keep wondering why anyone should care if some Russian oligarchs and businesses — and corrupt officials — lose a bundle in Cyprus.
Yes, I know, the European Union’s original, ham-handed proposal — a tax on every bank deposit in Cyprus — was potentially destabilizing to the world’s financial system. It raised the specter of bank runs not just in Cyprus but all over Europe. It served as a jolting reminder that the European crisis is still with us. Yada, yada.
But it also turns out that much of the hot money held in the Cypriot banking system is Russian. Russian companies like the low taxes that come with having entities in Cyprus. Because of the wink, wink, nod, nod relationship between Cyprus and Russia, rubles deposited in Cypriot banks are as untraceable as dollars once were in Swiss bank accounts, according to Dmitry Gudkov, an opposition politician (about whom more in a moment). Corrupt officials who embezzle money have long found Cyprus to be a friendly haven. Bloomberg Businessweek reported earlier this week that a substantial amount of the $230 million fraud perpetrated in 2007 against Hermitage Capital — a crime unearthed by Sergei Magnitsky, the brave lawyer who died in prison after he exposed the fraud — can be traced to Cyprus.
To put it another way, the henchmen of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, who have gotten rich by trampling over the rule of law, are now getting a taste of their own medicine. In Cyprus, with no warning, the rules changed, and deposits larger than 100,000 euros may now face “haircuts” of as much as 40 percent. Though the purpose of the tax is to save the country’s banking system, the outcome is the same as when Russian officials create phony tax charges to steal a businessman’s assets. People feel they are being robbed. And they become extremely upset.
The funniest part is that according to Reuters, some Russian entities are threatening to sue. Actually, that makes a certain perverse sense: one of the reasons Russian bureaucrats are so quick to move their newly stolen wealth out of Russia is that they want it in a place where the rule of law actually has some meaning. They don’t want done to them what they’ve done to their fellow citizens.
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UK fund boss warned Germany about Russian money in Cyprus
UK fund manager Bill Browder, one of the Kremlin’s harshest critics, briefed German officials on Russian money laundering in Cyprus just before the European Union set tough terms for the island’s bailout.
He said at least $31 million was laundered through Cyprus bank accounts, funds that were part of a $230 million fraud his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky discovered before his death in a Moscow prison in 2009.
Browder said the Mediterranean island, one of the most important conduits for Russian money transfers, opened an investigation in December into the allegations the businessman first made in 2008.
Once the largest fund manager in Russia through his $4 billion Hermitage fund, Britain-based Browder is currently on trial in absentia in Russia on fraud charges. He denies any wrongdoing and says the charges are politically motivated.
“When Cyprus started to ask the Europeans for a 17 billion euro bailout, it seemed to me absurd that we should be bailing out Cyprus if they are unwilling to investigate the most well documented money laundering cases,” Browder said.
Browder spoke with Levin Holle, director general of financial markets policy at Germany’s ministry of finance, at a meeting last month confirmed by the ministry.
“There was a German team of people at a fairly senior level that were involved in structuring the Cyprus bailout. And they were very interested in what we had to say about this,” Browder said.
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EU audit on Cyprus money laundering – whitewash in the making?
Auditors on an EU-sponsored mission to see if Cypriot banks launder money for Russian criminals began work last Wednesday (20 March).
The project has slipped out of view amid dramatic talks on Cyprus’ new bailout.
But it is likely to come back with a vengeance when the Dutch, Finnish and German parliaments vote in April on whether the EU should lend Cyprus the €10 billion it needs.
The German government pushed for the probe in the first place because the Social-Democrat opposition threatened to veto a Cypriot rescue on money laundering grounds.
“This is a matter of concern … for public opinion in several of our member states,” European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso noted on Monday.
There are two units doing the job.
One is Moneyval, a specialist branch of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, whose top man, John Ringguth, a former British prosecutor, was in Nicosia last week to kick things off.
The other is a “private international audit firm” to be hired by Cyprus’ central bank.
The auditors’ terms of reference (what powers they have, which banks they will check) are “confidential,” to use the phrase of one German official.
Moneyval told EUobserver its task is to “focus exclusively on the effectiveness of Customer Due Diligence (CDD) measures in the [Cypriot] banking sector.” In other words, to see if banks check who their customers really are.
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Sergei Magnitsky uncovered Russia-to-Cyprus money laundering, and look what happened to him
The latest eurozone crisis comes down to controversy over bailing out a Cypriot banking system that is flooded with Russian black money.
The EU-proposed “haircut” solution — with a 9.9 percent levy on large deposits in Cyprus — received zero votes in Cyprus’ parliament and Russian president Vladimir Putin called it “unjust, unprofessional and dangerous.” Attempts to find a compromise have foundered.
In any case, it is clear that powerful people in Russia want to preserve the ability to use Cyprus as a tax haven, alleged money-laundering vehicle, and backdoor into the eurozone.
Just look at what happened to Sergei Magnitsky, the Moscow-based lawyer who was imprisoned and died mysteriously in jail after calling attention to Russian corruption, including alleged money-laundering in Cyprus.
Magnitsky had been working for Hermitage Capital, a fund managed by American Bill Browder. After Hermitage’s offices were raided in 2007, Magnitsky began investigating and later testified that he had uncovered a huge scam by top police officials to embezzle $230 million in taxes from money that Hermitage Fund companies had paid in 2006.
Magnitsky alleged that the corrupt cops had used corporate seals and documents seized in the raid on Hermitage’s Moscow office and set up fake companies under the same names, which then received a full tax rebate.
Hermitage said that some $31 million of that money was then moved out of Russia using five Cypriot banks: Alpha Bank, Cyprus Popular Bank, FBME Bank, Privatbank International and Komercbanka.
The story quickly turned tragic. In November 2008, Magnitsky himself was charged with tax evasion and taken to prison. Kept in Moscow’s notorious pre-trial prisons, Magnitsky unexpectedly died in November 2009. His death was originally attributed to a an abdominal membrane rupture before officials changed that to a heart attack. Magnitsky is one of four witnesses in the case who have died in mysterious circumstances.
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