Posted on 06/25/2002 6:11:19 PM PDT by Sawdring
MOSCOW - More and more names have been linked to an Italian-led operation against money laundering by Russian organized-crime groups, which led to more than 50 arrests in Europe and Canada earlier this week, giving some indication of how sprawling a network investigators have hit upon.
"We got our hands on an international organization with a Russian base that has links to European organized crime and, in order to reinvest its money, used a complex money-laundering web," Reuters quoted Francesco Gratteri, head of the special police department that coordinates international operations, as saying after Monday's arrests.
"The profits of drug trafficking, arms trade and human trafficking are being reinvested in legal businesses in various countries," Gratteri said, adding that export-import companies, clothing, cosmetics and household goods businesses were used to front the activities, often with the help of forged bills and banking orders.
The trans-Atlantic sweep, code-named Operation Spiderweb, flowed out of the U.S. money-laundering investigation into the Bank of New York. Italian officials said some of the money had been funneled through accounts of the Benex Corp., which was also a focus of the U.S. investigation, and related accounts at BoNY.
About half of the detained suspects were Russian nationals. But while this week's leg of the operation involved investigators from Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany and the FBI, Russian officials seemed to be unaware of their colleagues' activities.
"There is no official information on this for now," Alexei Orlov, chief of the Interior Ministry's economic crimes department, told reporters Thursday. Orlov added that he had not heard of arrests being made "in such numbers."
This week's arrests were made at the request of prosecutors from Bologna, Italy. Switerzland's Tribune de Geneve newspaper reported Wednesday that the prosecutors had issued a list of 150 people suspected of ties to organized crime and money-laundering and called for 101 of them to be detained for questioning. Gratteri said Monday that more arrests were expected to follow, mostly in Europe.
During the crackdown, police conducted hundreds of searches across Europe, seized luxury properties, cars and goods to the tune of 100 million euros ($94.3 million) and ordered a freeze on 300 bank accounts used to recycle money from alleged illegal activities, news reports said. Two of the bank accounts alone held about four million euros, Reuters quoted police as saying.
Italian investigators said Wednesday that they had focused their investigation into Russian organized-crime activity near the Italian seaside resort Rimini, where Russian businesspeople became particularly active after the Soviet collapse, buying consumer goods for the Russian market, The New York Times reported.
Two companies at the heart of the probe are a Rimini marketing company called Prima, controlled by Russian émigré Oleg Berezovsky, and Paris-based Kama Trade, controlled by Berezovsky's brother Igor. The two men are not related to self-exiled businessperson Boris Berezovsky, his spokesperson Vladimir Voronkov said by telephone from London.
Igor Berezovsky was detained in the western French city of Rennes, according to The New York Times. France's Le Monde newspaper reported that local officials had been watching Kama Trade since 1996, when it was red-flagged by the French anti-laundering organization Tracfin. A preliminary investigation into Kama Trade's activities revealed that it worked with six companies specializing in the transport of raw materials, such as mineral resources or oil, all of which showed signs of "unorthodox" financial records, such as huge, inexplicable jumps in turnover.
The investigators said that another Russian detained in France,
Andreas Marissov, 38, an associate of the Berezovskys, is suspected of supplying funds and other support to rebel groups in Chechnya, The New York Times reported.
One of the most prominent names reported to be among the 101 people against whom Bologna prosecutors have issued arrest warrants is that of Gregory Loutschansky, head of the Vienna-based company Nordex. The Swissinfo information service, a unit of the Swiss Broadcasting Corp., reported Thursday that authorities believe Loutschansky to be a leading figure within the organized-crime network. Swissinfo also said that the 57-year-old emigre from Uzbekistan was previously sentenced to seven years behind bars in Lithuania for theft of state property.
The New York Times cited police as saying that a significant figure in the early stages of the investigation was Vladimir Vassarenko, 34, who had established himself in the early 1990s in Rimini, where he organized shopping tours for Russian businesspeople intent on buying Italian-made consumer goods for resale in Russia.
Along with a business associate, Simon Bakhchinyan, Vassarenko is suspected of having broadened his activities to include smuggling artworks and illegal immigrants, including young East European women going to work in the West as prostitutes, the newspaper said.
Of the detained, about 20 are being held in Italy, 12 in France and Monte Carlo, and the remainder in several other European countries and Canada, The New York Times said.
Italy's la Reppublica and other European newspapers noted that many of the Italians who were arrested had Russian wives. La Reppublica said that one of the detained was Gaudenzio Bagnollini, 50, a Rimini businesspeople thought to be the main contact of Russian mafia there, who worked together with his wife Liana Kharitonova, 32.
It was not clear exactly how much money had been laundered through the criminal network, but various reports cited investigators saying that the sum was in the billions of dollars.
Interior Minister Boris Gryzlov met Thursday with Interpol chief Ronald Noble to discuss money-laundering, ways to cut off financing of international terrorist organizations and closing the so-called "northern route" used by drug traffickers to ship heroin from Afghanistan. However, no mention was made of this week's Italian-led operation.
Russia has been trying desperately to shake off its reputation as an easy avenue for money-laundering. Last year, Russia was ranked 81st out of 91 countries in Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index.
Earlier this year, a national financial intelligence unit known as the Financial Monitoring Committee was created in an effort to solve the problem. This month the committee was voted into the anti-money-laundering organization Egmont.
But the big test will come next week, when Russia hopes to be taken off the OECD's Financial Action Task Force blacklist of countries that do not have adequate legislation or law enforcement to combat money laundering.
This is odd, Loutschansky was invited to a pirvate DNC fund-raising dinner for Bill Clinton in 1993. To bad B.C. isn't in office still, he could have granted this man a pardon.
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