‘Insignificant.’ Financial officials in Moscow comment on Russia’s role in worldwide money laundering exposed in leaked U.S. Treasury data.
Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) has commented on documents leaked earlier this week from the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen) showing that banks and the U.S. Government were away of wide-scale money laundering but did little to stop it. Russian officials told the news agency RBC that they don’t ignore banking transactions that could be linked to money laundering:
“The facts stated in the [leaked] materials have been reviewed multiple times by both Russian financial intelligence and others in the country’s system to combat money laundering. Not everything indicated criminal activity, though a number of facts form the basis of criminal matters and convictions were handed down in some of these cases.
Rosfinmonitoring offered no specifics, citing a statutory ban on such disclosures, but officials did say that the amount of information in the FinCen leak concerning Russia was “insignificant in the general data set.”
On September 20, 2020, BuzzFeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists released FinCen documents describing more than 200,000 suspicious financial transactions between 1999 and 2017, valued at more than $2 trillion, that occurred across multiple global financial institutions. Russia has been connected to more than 3,800 of these transfers.
The leaked FinCen records feature information about offshore accounts belonging to individuals believed to be close to Vladimir Putin, including musician Sergey Roldugin, presidential adviser Valentin Yumashev, and the billionaires Arkady Rotenberg and Roman Abramovich. Being named in FinCen’s documents, however, does not necessarily mean someone broke the law.