Olympics, yeah they are corrupt and the Russian Olympic comittee is as corrupt as any of them. And I'm glad to see people riffing on that here. But that's not my intent with this therad.
This article contains a some of the iron in the axe that I'm grinding.
The FinCEN Files Show Suspicious Activities of Kazakhstan’s Former Oligarchs
Hundreds of millions of dollars of suspicious origin have transited in and out of Kazakhstan with the help of U.S. banks, an investigation of thousands of leaked documents reveals.
LinK:
Article from The Diplomat read with a skeptical eye, the content is all true but there is stink in it
A wide range of “usual suspects” popped up on the news reels as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and BuzzFeed News unveiled the collated data of the so-called FinCEN Files, which showed how U.S. banks served as intermediaries for thousands of suspicious international transactions over an 18-year period. Inevitably, Kazakhstan’s former oligarchs were part of the scandal.
In 1990, the U.S. Treasury Department created an agency, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), in an effort to combat domestic and international money laundering, as the U.S. banking system had become the main catalyst of global financial transactions.
The documents leaked to investigative journalists show that while the FinCEN collected millions of suspicious activity reports (SARs) — in which banks or brokers flagged transactions potentially liable for money laundering, terrorist financing, or other financial crimes — the agency had no power to stop the transactions.
A BuzzFeed summary of the findings, for example, highlights the role played by Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, American Express, and others in processing “millions of dollars in transactions for the family of Viktor Khrapunov […] even after Interpol issued a Red Notice for his arrest.” Once close to Kazakhstan’s former ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev, Viktor Khrapunov served as the mayor of Almaty. After falling out with Nazarbayev and allegedly defrauding the city through opaque public tenders, Khrapunov fled to Switzerland.
There are three issues contained in this report. Two are true and honest -- for one, Viktor Khrapunov is up to his eyeballs in dirty money. It's impossible to BE a political leader in Kazakhstan without it. He's used
Swiss, UK and US banks to move money to tune of hundreds of millions of dollars out of Kazakhstan, washed it through multiple transactions and invested it in real estate deals, much of which ended up in the US. US banks are not only complicit in this but make big profits from it and that's the second true and valid point. I don't have a link but a Financial Times reporter claims
about half of all the world's dirty money pass through US banks who in turn help clean it up "for a fee".
The third and sneakily corrupt issue in this report is, Viktor Khrapunov (see a bio below) is on the run from Kazakhstan's vile, treacherous and deadly government. They have plenty of charges posted against him but the real reason he is on their kill list is because he was party to a reform movement in Kazakhstan in opposition to then dictator,
Nursultan Nazarbayev. Another person who had to flee for his life was a man who owned one of the largest banks in Kasakhstan, Mukhtar Ablyazov . Nazarbayev had demanded full control of Mukhtar's bank and he refused to do so. Then the reform movement started and Nazarbayev crushed it. Many died, a few got out alive, including these two. They managed to sneak money out of that corrupt state, money that is the source of the funds discussed in this article.
What is wrong with reporting on Viktor's dirty money? I'll get to that. First more
background information from Buzzfeed News:
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, is the agency within the Treasury Department charged with combating money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes. It collects millions of these suspicious activity reports, known as SARs. It makes them available to US law enforcement agencies and other nations’ financial intelligence operations. It even compiles a report called “Kleptocracy Weekly” that summarizes the dealings of foreign leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin.
What it does not do is force the banks to shut the money laundering down.
The FinCEN Files investigation shows that even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.
if the database is a powerful asset to law enforcement investigations, to privacy advocates, it is a nightmare of overreach.
Congress created the current SAR program in 1992 making banks the frontline in the fight against money laundering. But Michael German, a former FBI special agent who is a national security and privacy expert, said that after 9/11, "the SAR program became more about mass surveillance than identifying discrete transactions to disrupt money launderers.”
The Buzzfeed article goes on to say, and this is the corruption and shitty propaganda embedded in that article from The Diplomat, "know the Asia Pacific":
Today, he said, "the data is used like the data from other mass surveillance programs. Find someone you want to get for whatever reason then sift through the vast troves of data collected to find anything you can hang them with."
So there it is. I'm connecting dots and have no proof, so "you decide". Banks in the US are swimming with blood money, money stolen from people who were swindled, menaced or killed. Money that was stolen its people by dictators and oligarchs. But the instrument that could be used to prosecute both the bankers and the kleptocrats is toothless. As long as the bank reports suspicious activity, their hands are clean as far as the law goes. The people who benefit from the law are the kleptocrats and their crime gang. They are using FinCen reports to find and go after the people on their hit lists.
Dang, I need to go take a shower. Reading this shit makes me feel dirty.
Trump is involved here too. I'll get to him later. But here is one tidbit from the Buzzfeed report:
In the rare instances when the US government does crack down on banks, it often relies on sweetheart deals called deferred prosecution agreements, which include fines but no high-level arrests. The Trump administration has made it even harder to hold executives personally accountable, under guidance by former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein that warned government agencies against “piling on.” Rosenstein did not respond to requests for comment, but after this article was published, he wrote to say that his policies sought to “encourage prosecutors to pursue charges against the people responsible for corporate wrongdoing.”
Bold font was added for emphasis
www.reuters.com
