Canary in the Coal Mine - Day

Thursday, October 1, 2020

9:43PM

"One bank alone, Bank of New York Mellon, filed suspicious activity reports to the U.S. Treasury Department that flagged $7.1 billion in suspicious transactions that had flowed through Latvia’s Regional Investment Bank between 2006 and 2015.

Bank of New York Mellon separately reported $1 billion in suspect funds running through accounts at Meridian Trade Bank, now known as Industra Bank, between 2000 and 2014. For much of that time, Meridian Trade Bank had been the local offshoot of Russia’s SMP Bank, a group owned by Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, billionaire brothers and lifelong friends of president Vladimir Putin.

In 2014, shares in the Lativan branch were hurriedly offloaded to local investors after the Rotenberg’s wider SMP Bank empire, and the brothers themselves, became the subject of U.S. sanctions targeted at Putin’s inner circle.

Of even greater concern to Bank of New York Mellon was a third Latvian bank called Expobank, formerly LTB Bank, owned by a publicity-shy Russian banking tycoon called Igor Kim. According to Bank of New York Mellon, a staggering $29.2 billion in suspicious funds flowed through Expobank in just under a decade, between 2006 and early 2016.

Two other Latvian banks that featured prominently in FinCEN Files were Trasta Komercbanka and ABLV Bank, both of which collapsed amid money laundering scandals."

https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/europes-anti-money-laundering-chief-defends-his-record-in-wake-of-fincen-files/

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