Jan. 14 – Financial crimes in Russia last year caused up to US$158 billion (5 trillion rubles) in illegal turnover on the Russian financial market, an amount equal to 10 percent of Russia’s gross domestic product, the Central Bank and Russian Interior Ministry have calculated.
According to their research, 56,700 crimes took place between January and November 2011 that impacted the financial and credit industries of Russia.
“A total of 653 cases of money laundering were registered in the first 11 months of 2011 with the amount of illegally-earned money caught in the process of being legalized amounting to 1.2 billion rubles (around US$40 million) between January and September,” Oleg Borisov, head of the Interior Ministry department responsible for financial sector economic crime, said to Interfax.
He added that 33.4 percent of these 1.2 billion rubles were the result of fraud, 32.4 percent from drug trafficking and sales, 9.6 percent from illegal credit and 6.2 percent from smuggling.
There are 457 economic crimes subject to the 193rd article of the Criminal Code of Russia “of non-return of funds in foreign currency from abroad” which are 28 percent more than for the same period in 2010.
Borisov said that they investigated 500 cases of precipitated bankruptcies for that time period, which is a remarkably large number of crimes compared with the same period of 2010.
He gave the example of one individual accused of criminally bankrupting an oil and chemical company in the Omsk Region. The suspect “intentionally transferred assets to firms under his control that led to the bankruptcy [of the original company],” Borisov said. “As a result, the company’s creditors had 7 billion rubles worth of damage inflicted on them.”
