Tag: money laundering
Ukraine Is Our War -- And Joe Biden Is Our Wartime President

Ukraine Is Our War -- And Joe Biden Is Our Wartime President

We and our allies are in a war to save civilization. Fortunately for us, Ukrainians are doing the fighting.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's barbaric assault on Ukraine has awakened Europe to the reality that he is truly evil and could continue his march westward. It is no coincidence that Sweden and Finland — once fiercely neutral countries — now show serious interest in joining NATO. Ukraine is not in NATO, which is why members of the military alliance have held back in sending in their forces.

It is also the West's good fortune that Joe Biden is president and not Donald Trump. Overseeing a flood of arms to Ukraine as it fights alone, Biden is playing Franklin Roosevelt to Ukraine's Winston Churchill, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. And he's doing it carefully, working with allies to squeeze Russia financially and giving Ukraine the means to defend itself, all the while carefully trying to avoid a wider conflict.

This is a full-time job whose consequences are not politically helpful. Confronting Putin has raised the cost of gasoline. It's making food more expensive. The resulting inflation has hiked the cost of borrowing to buy a home.

This, plus the carnage in Ukraine, is making Americans feel bad. The tendency in such circumstances is to blame the president, even when the president is doing the best job possible managing crises that aren't his fault. (The one exception for Biden would be his fuzzy messages about easing immigration restrictions at a time of a surge at the border.)

Those worried about climate change must hold their tongues as Biden releases 1 million barrels of oil a day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Same goes for his plan to open some public lands to new drilling.

It's hard to calculate the threat to national security had Trump won reelection — or succeeded in pulling off a coup after he lost. Trump was God's gift to Putin and his maniacal plans. Russians have owned him for decades.

In 1987, Trump took out full-page newspaper ads urging Americans to stop paying to defend others, the big subtext being to leave NATO. (George W. Bush and Barack Obama also called for other countries to raise defense spending but didn't dream of using that as an excuse to compromise U.S. security.)

These were Russian talking points parroted by a real estate investor whom the Russians were bailing out of bankruptcies. Trump in return laundered Russian oligarch/mob money through sales of U.S. property in all-cash, anonymous transactions. One example is the deluxe Trump Towers in Miami's Sunny Isles Beach, now known as "Little Russia."

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential election to help elect comrade Trump. He came through for the Russians three years later when he blocked nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.

Trump claims that Putin would never have invaded Ukraine had he still been president. This is the opposite of true. Trump's advisers reportedly warned him that blowing up NATO would be unpopular and could cost him reelection.

"Yeah, the second term," Trump is said to have responded. "We'll do it in the second term."

Had Trump succeeded, Putin would now have free rein to rampage through Eastern Europe and who knows where else.

After calling Putin "a genius" for invading Ukraine, Trump added, "I know him very well. Very, very well."

Apparently not nearly as well as Putin knows Trump.

As a wartime president, Biden has one mission: to stop the aggressor. He doesn't have the luxury to obsess over rough poll numbers related to inflation. And the culture wars can wait. Right now, the only war that matters is the one directed at defeating Putin.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: jorono at Pixabay


How Biden Can Curtail Terrorism, Tax Evasion, And Money Laundering

How Biden Can Curtail Terrorism, Tax Evasion, And Money Laundering

Reprinted with permission from DC Report

Money laundering, both for terrorist finance and tax evasion, threatens national security. Now a private group that watches the quality of anti-money laundering efforts has put forth a smart plan to modernize and upgrade our government's capacity to track illicit cross-border financial transactions.

This is news you will be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

Global Financial Integrity has a plan, and it's a good one, to better America's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. FinCEN, as it's known, is a critical government agency housed at Treasury and staffed heavily with IRS financial sleuths. It doesn't get nearly the respect or budget it deserves.

Global Financial Integrity is itself an under-appreciated Washington nonprofit funded by a host of sources including the Ford Foundation and five governments, though not the United States. On a budget of not much more than $1 million per year, it has done solid work calling attention to the growing problem of illicit finance.

Jim Henry, DCReport's economics correspondent, has spent decades documenting the flow of illicit money. He estimates from analysis of official banking and trade documents that at least $40 trillion of illicit money sloshes around the globe. The total may be $50 trillion.

To get an idea of the gigantic size of that bag of corrupt money consider this: Henry's lower-end estimate almost equals the combined annual economic output of the world's two largest economies, America and China.

Global Financial Integrity, in a report titled "Enhancing National Security by Re-imagining FinCEN," makes these recommendations:

  1. Give the FinCEN director a seat on the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council (NSC) to raise the agency's stature within the national security community.
  2. Create within FinCEN a National Anti-Money Laundering Data Center for advanced data collection, synthesis, analysis, and distribution to law enforcement for AML activity.
  3. Establish a "Manhattan Project" to identify, develop, and use state-of-the-art technologies needed to fulfill the technology for that data center.
  4. Launch within FinCEN a National Anti-Money Laundering Training Center which will be an anti-money laundering knowledge and education hub for FinCEN staff, financial institution regulators, law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels and for both state and federal prosecutors.
  5. Create a Strategic Analysis Team to examine emerging and long-term trends in money laundering methods and computer technologies to counter those threats.

Those are superb ideas all. But will Congress care?

A core problem with hunting for terrorist finance is that the tools used to sift through billions of transactions involving trillions of dollars are the financial equivalent of trawling the ocean bottom for cod. Trawlers catch plenty of cod, but they also drag in many unwanted species.

Tax Cheats Off The Hook

The George W. Bush administration was averse to a serious hunt for big-league tax cheats. It disconnected from a nascent movement by major countries to coordinate their tax policies, a boon to tax cheats. It even refused to hire 80 more IRS investigators to hunt for transactions by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in the wake of 9/11.

Source: UN Office on Drugs and Crime

The official excuse was that taxpayers couldn't afford an extra $12 million in spending. That is an absurdity when trillions were being spent on the wars in Afghanistan, still underway, and Iraq. But the funding denial made perfect sense if you knew that anti-money laundering nets catch tax cheats along with terrorists. And since the political donor class is rife with tax cheating, catching tax cheats can be inconvenient for politicians in power, and fellow party members, as a Congressional staffer recently reminded me.

In writing about money laundering in casinos since 1988, in my coverage of taxes since 1995, and on terrorist finance after 9/11, I developed a deep appreciation for the unsung work of FinCEN – and recognition of its weaknesses.

More People, Better Tech

What is needed now to strengthen FinCEN: more staff, super-sophisticated computers on par with the National Security Agency, and, most of all, adding a seat for FinCEN at White House National Security Council meetings.

A FinCEN director once told me that given enough time and resources his staff could find a single $19.99 credit card transaction anywhere in the world. The 9/11 attacks were cheap, costing only about $100,000. We shouldn't forget that relatively small expenditures can be used to cause enormous harm.

To find the little transactions behind big attacks in the future FinCEN needs enormous computer power to separate golden nuggets of fact from the massive overburden of routine financial transactions. FinCEN also needs to be set free to find not just terrorists, but tax cheats.

With trillions of dollars of illicit money in the hands of criminals, kleptocrats, and terrorists, and hundreds of billions of dollars of federal income taxes evaded each year, it's long past time to upgrade FinCEN.

Congress Probes Trump Connection To Russian Money Laundering

Congress Probes Trump Connection To Russian Money Laundering

Congress is getting set to investigate Trump’s personal finances and how they connect to Deutsche Bank, which has allegedly been involved in Russian money laundering.

“There’s a heightened need to look into anything that could compromise the president or the country, particularly if it’s not being investigated elsewhere,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Both the House Financial Services and House Intelligence Committees are hiring staffers for probes.

Trump owes Deutsche Bank at least $130 million according to his most recent financial disclosure.

Investigators are trying to figure out why the bank chose to lend Trump money to pursue real estate development considering his multiple bankruptcies.

In December, Schiff explained the concern about Trump and Deutsche Bank on NBC’s Meet the Press.

“Well, the concern about Deutsche Bank is that they have a history of laundering Russian money,” he said. “And this, apparently, was the one bank that was willing to do business with the Trump Organization.”

In November, German police raided Deutsche Bank’s offices as part of an investigation into money laundering. Prosecutors said the bank helped 900 customers set up offshore accounts to hide money “from criminal activities.”

Trump turned to the same bank when he was developing real estate projects before the election.

“All we know is that there was one period of Donald Trump’s before he became president where he was spending cash for his developments all around the world,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO).

Cleaver noted that “very few people pay cash” when they are engaged in the large real estate deals Trump was doing. But “he was paying cash at a time when he wasn’t supposed to have money.”

The investigations come after Trump whined about the possibility that special counsel Robert Mueller could investigate his personal finances. In an interview with the New York Times, Trump characterized any such investigation as a “red line.”

Congress isn’t listening. Led by the Democrats, the House Committees are poised to finally discover what’s really behind the bankrolling of Trump.

Published with permission of The American Independent.

IMAGE: The Deutsche Bank headquarters are seen in Frankfurt, Germany October 28, 2015. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach 

Huge Document Leak Exposes How The Wealthy And Powerful Hide Money

Huge Document Leak Exposes How The Wealthy And Powerful Hide Money

Kevin G. Hall and Marisa Taylor
McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted with permission from Tribune Content Agency

WASHINGTON — A massive leak of documents has blown open a window on the vast, murky world of shell companies, providing an extraordinary look at how the wealthy and powerful conceal their money.

Twelve current and former world leaders maintain offshore shell companies. Close friends of Russian leader Vladimir Putin have funneled as much as $2 billion through banks and offshore companies.

Those exposed in the leak include the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan, an alleged bagman for Syrian President Bashar Assad, a close friend of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and companies linked to the family of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Add to those the monarchs of Saudi Arabia and Morocco; Middle Eastern royalty; leaders of FIFA, the international body that controls international soccer; and 29 billionaires included in Forbes Magazine’s list of the world’s 500 richest people.

Also mentioned are 61 relatives and associates of current country leaders, and 128 ther current or former politicians and public officials.

The leak exposes a trail of dark money flowing through the global financial system, stripping national treasuries of tax revenue.

The data breach occurred at a little-known but powerful Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca & Co., which has an office in Las Vegas, a representative in Miami and presence in more than 35 other places around the world.

The firm is one of the world’s top five creators of shell companies, which can have legitimate business uses but can also be used to dodge taxes and launder money.

More than 11.5 million emails, financial spreadsheets, client records, passports and corporate registries were obtained in the leak, which was delivered to the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper in Munich, Germany. In turn, the newspaper shared the data with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Several McClatchy journalists joined more than 370 journalists from 78 countries in the largest media collaboration ever undertaken after a leak.

The document archive contains 2.6 terabytes of data.

As a registered agent, the Mossack Fonseca law firm incorporates companies in tax havens worldwide for a fee. It has avoided close scrutiny from U.S. law enforcement officials.

Mossack Fonseca denied all accusations of illegal activity.

“We have not once in nearly 40 years of operation been charged with criminal wrongdoing,” spokesman Carlos Sousa said. “We’re proud of the work we do, notwithstanding recent and willful attempts by some to mischaracterize it.”

The law firm’s co-founder, Ramon Fonseca, in an interview last month on Panamanian television, said blaming Mossack Fonseca for what people do with their companies would be like blaming an automaker “for an accident or if the car was used in a robbery.”

Yet plenty of criminals are named the documents, like drug traffickers and convicted fraudsters.

“The offshore world is the parallel universe of the ultrarich and ultrapowerful,” said Jack Blum, a white-collar crime attorney and an architect of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

The archive, which dates to the late 1970s and extends through December 2015, reveals that 14,000 intermediaries and middlemen bring business to Mossack Fonseca.

No part of the world is untouched, including the United States.

States such as Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming register thousands of corporations annually, often without identifying the true owners. Some of the billions of dollars moving through the domestic economy come from anonymous foreigners who inflate real estate prices in places like Miami, buying properties outright in cash.

“We know (of) upwards to $6 to $10 billion a year laundered through the U.S.,” said Patrick Fallon Jr., head of the FBI’s financial crimes section.

The most extraordinary allegations in the archive revolve around Putin’s closest associates, including Sergey Roldugin), a close friend since the late 1970s when Putin was a young KGB agent.

Roldugin is a cellist for the St. Petersburg orchestra, yet his name appears as the owner of offshore companies that have rights to loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A Russian news service report in 2010 disclosed that he owned at least 3 percent of Bank Rossiya, Russia’s most important bank.

When Mossack Fonseca helped open a bank account in Switzerland on behalf of Roldugin, the application form asked if he had “any relation to PEPs (politically exposed persons) or VIPs.”

The one-word answer was, “No.” Yet, Roldugin is godfather to Putin’s daughter Mariya.

“Roldugin is, by his proximity to a serving head of state, clearly an exposed person,” Mark Pieth, a former head of the Swiss justice ministry’s organized crime division, told the ICIJ team.

The documents show how in 2008 a company controlled by Roldugin had influence over Russia’s largest truck maker Kamaz, joining with several other offshore companies to help another Putin insider acquire majority control of the company. They wanted foreign investment, and German carmaker Daimler later that year bought a 10 percent stake in Kamaz for $250 million.

The offshore company that connects many Putin loyalists is Sandalwood Continental Limited in the British Virgin Islands. Roldugin was a shareholder until 2012, as was Oleg Gordin, a little-known businessman whom incorporation documents describe as linked to “law enforcement agencies.”

The files also mention a company co-owned by Putin friend Yury Kovalchuk, the largest shareholder of Bank Rossiya. Kovalchuk was among those targeted by U.S. sanctions in 2014 in retribution for Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Another friend, Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s judo partner and a billionaire construction mogul, openly obtained companies through Mossack Fonseca. The Treasury Department, when sanctioning him in 2014, suggested that the oligarch acted on behalf of “a senior official.”

That was widely believed to mean Putin, whose fingerprints were not on any offshore company.

“When you are the president of Russia, you don’t need a written contract. You are the law,” said Karen Dawisha, an academic, former State Department official and author of the acclaimed 2014 book “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?”

A Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said last week that ICIJ was publishing a “series of fibs” that amounted to a media “attack” on Putin. Peskov suggested that unknown “organizations and services” were behind the media reports.

https://www.publicintegrity.org/node/19492/syndication/tracking

This report contains information gathered by reporters working under the umbrella of the nonprofit International Consortium for Investigative Journalists.

Photo: Four thousand U.S. dollars are counted out by a banker counting currency at a bank in Westminster, Colorado November 3, 2009.  REUTERS/Rick Wilking