Transnational Crime: Russian Case

** Examples of Disappearing Russian Assets **
  1. Officials in the national treasury: stealing nearly $200 million in gems and gold and selling them off in California
  2. Managers of Sovkomflot, a major state-owned shipping company: funneling cash into private accounts and transferring ship ownership overseas
  3. An authorized sales of military hardware by top officials
  4. West’s loans and international aid are suspected of ending up in offshore accounts
  5. Total of $9 billion illegally flees country every year and some of $350 billion has fled since the fall of the Soviet Union and a third of it landing in the United States

** Pattern: Flight of assets from one to others **
  1. Accumulation of illegitimate assets establishing Crime Empire: Nation-side corruption, crime, extortion, prostitution, kidnapping, drug smuggling, arms dealing, and so on.
  2. Safe-havens legitimizing dirty money: Money laundering in Western and stabilized countries
  3. Washing billions of dollars through accounts of thousands of transactions tied to Russians at the Bank of New York

** Issues **
  1. Growing crime rate
  2. Crimes are getting more capable and sophisticated: getting hard to identify such schemes
  3. Global issues: migration