Moldova To Charge Bankers Involved in $20 Billion Money Laundering Scam - Report

Tom Burroughes

1 October 2014

In a new twist on stories of money laundering scams, it is reported that the east European state of Moldova plans to charge four or five bankers with money laundering, saying they helped shift as much as $20 billion in illicit cash from Russia to Latvia.

Bloomberg quoted Vasile Sarco, head of the country’s money-laundering prevention unit, as saying: ““The investigation is close to being finalized.” The report said Moldova’s central bank has fined a local lender and its management after a probe into $18 billion to $20 billion of suspicious transactions between 2010 and 2014.

The scheme was first reported by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a non-profit investigative journalism group, which said the activity the largest it’s encountered in the former Soviet Union. If confirmed, the number is more than double the size of Moldova’s $8 billion economy.

The group claims that 19 Russian banks used fake debts and court cases in Moldova to launder the money, transferring the funds from Moldova’s Moldindconbank to Latvia’s Trasta Kommercbanka, the news service said. Moldindconbank reportedly called the accusations “groundless”. Trasta strictly followed all laws, the news service quoted a spokesperson as saying.

Russia’s anti-money laundering authority, Rosfinmonitoring, declined to comment, the report added.