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Former Ukrainian President Poroshenko Secretly Controlled Offshore Firms that Banked at Austria’s Raiffeisen

By Graham Stack, OCCRP, 3 May 2021 OCCRP — In the early 2010s, Petro Poroshenko — a billionaire who had just served a stint as Ukraine’s foreign minister, and would later be elected president — built a palatial estate for himself outside Kyiv. He just needed furnishings… Read More

$2,350 set as minimum for banks to seek more client info in Seychelles

A sum of SCR50,000 ($2,350) has been set as the threshold for commercial banks in Seychelles to acquire information on purposes of transactions while dealing with their clients, said a top official of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU). The director of FIU, Richard Rampal, told reporters that the threshold has… Read More

Simon Giles: Rich man in his castle is facing eviction over dirty money claims

In the early 1500s a young Henry VIII visited Lullingstone Castle to take part in jousts and hunts in its extensive grounds. Hundreds of years later, the Kent estate was where Simon Giles, 41, chose to buy a home. It is said that when he was learning to fly he… Read More

15th December 2020

Hong Kong busts money-laundering ring that moved HK$880 million in 11 months

Hong Kong authorities have made four arrests in breaking up a transnational money-laundering syndicate that used a local remittance firm and more than 20 shell companies to launder HK$880 million (US$113.5 million) in 11 months, a senior customs official said on Tuesday. The suspects – three men and a woman… Read More

20th October 2020

The AML System: A Failure of Statecraft?

Consider the current state of anti-money laundering efforts across the globe. Around 2% of global GDP is laundered annually, amounting to between $800B – $2T. Banks spend around $8B annually fighting it but affect only 0.1% of criminal finance. What we know then is that the ROI of… Read More

2nd October 2020

BitMEX Founders Charged With Failing to Prevent Laundering

Founders of the pioneering crypto-derivatives exchange BitMEX were charged with skirting U.S. laws preventing money laundering and hit with civil sanctions as well, abruptly sending the price of Bitcoin down. Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed were indicted in New York, where federal prosecutors claim the digital-asset exchange… Read More

28th September 2020

Top-secret records show Canadian companies received millions in suspicious transfers

Off the coast of Mauritania in northwest Africa, thick black smoke billowed from a massive fishing trawler, trapping the crew on a vessel operated by a Canadian shell company. It was July 19, 2019, and the Ivan Golubets, an imposing vessel comparable to the size of a soccer field, was… Read More

28th September 2020

How the Commonwealth Bank helped a Bitcoin fraud suspect accused of laundering billions

Alexander Vinnik is in a world of trouble. The 40-year-old Russian is inside a jail cell in France, where prosecutors argue he is responsible for a vast criminal enterprise. His problems do not end there: US prosecutors want to extradite him to face criminal charges, while New Zealand police have… Read More

28th September 2020

Old school friends in cash ‘laundering web’

As schoolboys, their friendship was cemented while playing in the same rugby team at one of Britain’s most prestigious boarding schools. Since those days at The King’s School in Canterbury, Kirils Pestuns, James Dickins and Daniel O’Donoghue have unwittingly found themselves at the centre of a global network of companies… Read More

3rd August 2020

The U.S. is a haven for money laundering. That might be about to change.

The phrase “shell company” conjures images of offshore havens such as Panama or the British Virgin Islands, but one of the world’s leading enablers of financial secrecy is actually the United States. In every state, more personal details and proof of identity are required to get a library… Read More

22nd June 2020

In Daphne murder investigation, money trail leads to Montenegro venture

In the months before her murder in 2017, Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was on the trail of an offshore company called 17 Black Limited. She didn’t know who owned the firm, which was registered in the United Arab Emirates. But she was certain it was set up to channel… Read More

22nd May 2020

Evening Standard victory in secret papers fight over £14m ‘dirty cash’ case

Secret documents showing how a London couple brought at least £14 million of allegedly corrupt money from an “Azerbaijani laundromat” into Britain have been cleared for release by a judge in a partial court victory for the Evening Standard. Chief Magistrate Emma Arbuthnot said that this newspaper had an… Read More

20th February 2020

EU adds Seychelles, Cayman Islands, Panama to tax haven blacklist, spares Turkey

European Union finance ministers added Panama, the Seychelles, the Cayman Islands and Palau to the EU’s blacklist of tax havens, while giving Turkey more time to avoid being listed, an EU document said on Tuesday. The list, which was set up in 2017 after revelations of widespread tax evasion and… Read More

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