Stop the Untouchables. Justice for Sergei Magnitsky.

Corrupt money hides in Dubai, officials turn blind eye – Eva Joly

Thomson Reuters

Money allegedly stolen by Russian officials in a major scandal and funds looted from Afghanistan’s Kabul Bank are sitting in Dubai but international authorities have failed to hold the United Arab Emirates to account, a leading French politician said this week.

Eva Joly, a former magistrate known for exposing high-level political and business corruption in France, said officials should demand that Dubai give back the money stolen in Russia’s Magnitsky case and from Kabul Bank.

Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in jail, had been investigating an alleged large-scale theft by Russian officials while Kabul Bank nearly collapsed over corruption in 2010.

Joly called on the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to place the UAE on its black list of countries failing to enforce money-laundering laws.

“This is a shame, and we cannot live with it,” said Joly, a member of the European Parliament who was named to the anti-graft body backed by the United Nations to monitor corruption in Afghanistan.

“I cannot understand why the OECD blacklist is empty. Kabul Bank is the most important bank scandal ever, affecting 13 percent of the GDP of the country… and half of it is in Dubai,” she said at a roundtable discussion on the impact of the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention.