Tax transparency watchdog urges Israel to step up moves against money laundering
After global index puts Israel in top third of most financially secretive countries, NGO calls for more public scrutiny and regulations to stop rich from hiding their assets.

Israel must immediately move to pass regulations against tax evasion and money laundering if it is to protect its credit rating and avoid being shunned by the international financial community, a tax transparency watchdog cautioned in a report published Sunday.

The strongly worded advice coincided with a plea issued Monday by Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the 36-member Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon to speedily pass regulations enabling Israel to honor a commitment it made in 2014 to automatically exchange financial information….Timesofisrael.com

globalresearch.ca

Illegal profits used by Lebanese terrorist group to purchase weapons for Syrian war.
Lax German illicit terror finance policies permitted Hezbollah to run a vast enterprise to raise funds through a money laundering operation in Europe and South America.

French prosecutors put 15 members of the criminal organization on trial last week in Paris. According to three German media outlets – NDR, WDR and the Süddeutsche Zeitung – two of the accused men lived in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and an additional two men who were charged lived near the city-state of Bremen in northern Germany.

The members of the crime ring are charged with laundering Columbian narcotics money via a complex finance evasion scheme with the aid of the Lebanese diaspora.
“Germany is an ideal location for organized money laundering,” Sven Giegold, a Green Party member of the European Parliament, said according to a report in the paper Westfälischen Nachrichten.

“It is fully acceptable that one can pay cash for luxury goods or real estate,” Giegold said. “There are also no legal limits on the use of cash… Cash from dirty sources has a safe home in Germany.”
An export trader, named Ali Z., based in the city of Münster in North Rhine-Westphalia is believed to be one of the main alleged Hezbollah agents who oversaw the illegal narcotics operation that trafficked cocaine for a Columbian drug cartel, and used the profits to purchase weapons for Hezbollah to wage war in Syria……jpost.com/Israel-News

Germany allows 950 Hezbollah operatives to raise funds and recruit new members in the Federal Republic, according to numerous intelligence reports in the country that were reviewed by the Post. The United States, Canada, the Arab League, the Netherlands and Israel classify Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Germany and the European Union merely designate Hezbollah’s military wing as a terrorist entity.

Facebook/Kelly/ @KartoonistKelly

The European Commission on Thursday stepped up legal action against Malta and Luxembourg for not fully applying European Union rules to prevent money laundering at banks and through companies.

They are among several EU states where banks have been embroiled in money laundering scandals, but they have failed to strengthen their rules to counter financial crime, according to the EU Commission.

Malta has been subject to a rarely-used disciplinary procedure after serious shortcomings emerged in its supervision of Pilatus Bank, an international lender based on the island that was shut down this week by the European Central Bank over money laundering and fraud allegations.

The lender had received a clean sheet from Maltese authorities despite allegations of processing corrupt payments for senior Azeri and Maltese figures by investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed a year ago by a car bomb….EU steps up legal action against Malta, Luxembourg over money laundering/ Reuter

Malta had concerns about bank with Azeri clients, kept it open
Last April, a Maltese journalist published stories saying a private bank on her island was serving high-ranking customers in Azerbaijan, and alleging it was processing corrupt payments. Six months later the journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, was murdered.

A human rights organization has asked Dutch prosecutors to open a criminal investigation into multi-billion dollar money laundering schemes that they say were aided by Donald Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and his old law firm.

The complaint is clearly aimed at examining how much money stolen from a former Soviet satellite ended up benefitting Trump. He is named 16 times in the complaint’s footnotes.

The complaint describes “one of the biggest fraud cases ever” in which “some of these money flows ultimately ended up in the Netherlands” because “Dutch service providers helped to cover up the money laundering acts.”

“The money laundering network started in Kazakhstan, where a figure of up to USD 10 billion was purportedly embezzled,” the complaint asserts. “This money was subsequently circulated by two Kazakh oligarch families via a worldwide network of shell companies. A number of these companies were established in the Netherlands. The money was subsequently invested in real estate projects in the United States and Europe, after which it was paid out as ‘profits’ via – once again – a network of shell companies.”….
Human Rights Group Calls for Investigation of Giuliani, Trump Money-Laundering Scheme Prosecutors Asked to Probe Dutch Middlemen Washing Billions in Dirty Kazakh Cash for Real Estate Deals in US and Europe
Dutch Trump Complaint

Between 1993 and 2018, Russia had massive trade surpluses:
approximately 10% of GDP per annum on average for 25 years, or a total in the rage of 250% of GDP (two and a half years of national production). In principle that should have enabled the accumulation of the equivalent in financial reserves. This is almost the size of the sovereign public fund accumulated by Norway under the watchful gaze of the voters. The official Russian reserves are ten times lower – barely 25% of GDP.

Where has the money gone? According to our estimates, the offshore assets alone held by wealthy Russians exceed one year of GDP, or the equivalent of the entirety of the official financial assets held by Russian households. In other words, the natural wealth of the country, (which, let it be said in passing, would have done better to remain in the ground to limit global warming) has been massively exported abroad to sustain opaque structures enabling a minority to hold huge Russian and international financial assets. These rich Russians live between London, Monaco and Moscow: some have never left Russia and control their country via offshore entities. Numerous intermediaries and Western firms have also recouped large crumbs on the way and continue to do so today in sport and the media (sometimes this is referred to as philanthropy). The extent of the misappropriation of funds has no equal in history.

Rather than apply commercial sanctions, Europe would do better to finally go for these assets and to address Russian public opinion. Today post-Communism has become the worst ally of hyper-capitalism: Marx would have appreciated the irony but this is not a reason for putting up with it….Capital in Russia

Book Review: ‘Putin’s Kleptocracy’ by Karen Dawisha

Arend van Dam
www.w-t-w.org/en/arend-van-dam/

BRITAIN likes to see itself as a leader in the fight against illicit finance and corruption. The government has recently been talking even tougher, as worsening relations with Russia have focused attention on the number of oligarchs who have interests in London. Anyone looking to stash dirty money “should be in no doubt that we will come for them,” warns Ben Wallace, the economic-crime minister….Time to clean up

Britain’s war on dirty money lacks oomph
It is strong on transparency but weak on enforcement

London has been accused of being a major centre of money laundering.                                 Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

A Cautionary Tale about Online Anonymity.
Are bitcoin and the Darkweb as anonymous as people think?

But bitcoin isn’t actually that anonymous after all. Experts call it “pseudonymous,” comparable to writing a book under a pen name. Users are anonymous so long as there’s no connection between their identity and an account number. Obscuring that connection is not so easy. If you buy bitcoins in an online exchange office, you leave a bank or credit card receipt. If you pay in an online shop with bitcoins, you enter a delivery address. There’s a trail to almost every transaction.

Ross Ulbricht can spend the next decades thinking about the distinction between anonymous and pseudonymous while he’s serving a life sentence in prison. In 2011, he created a digital marketplace where customers could order anything from heroin to fake IDs. But relying on the anonymity of bitcoin and the dark side of the internet eventually led to Ulbricht’s downfall….The Silk Road a Real Thriller