How Social Media Silences Debate Times. That’s not a bug…
big dangers of our millionaire visaNew Zealand Companies Office’s $612Mn Money-Laundering Snooze
The Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project recently (21st August) published one of their periodic investigations, concerning a rather large moneylaundering scheme:
Since there’s plenty more to come from the OCCRP on various UK connections that surface in this scam, let us studiously avert our gaze from that particular aspect, and drag in poor old New Zealand instead, which duly crops up in one of the OCCRP’s documents, near the bottom of the page, in its exotic Romanian guise, “Noua Zeelandă”.Call it the Laundromat. It’s a complex system for laundering more than $20 billion in Russian money stolen from the government by corrupt politicians or earned through organized crime activity. It was designed to not only move money from Russian shell companies into EU banks through Latvia, it had the added feature of getting corrupt or uncaring judges in Moldova to legitimize the funds. The state-of-the-art system provided exceptionally clean money backed by a court ruling at a fraction of the cost of regular laundering schemes. It made up for the low costs by laundering huge volumes. The system used just one bank in Latvia and one bank in Moldova but 19 banks in Russia, some of them controlled by rich and powerful figures including the cousin of Russian President Vladimir Putin...
For good reasons, whenever one sees the words “New Zealand”, “money laundering”, and “Trasta Komercbanka”, two thoughts follow immediately: “GT Group” and “The New Zealand Registrar of Companies has screwed up again”. Those unfortunate prejudices turn out to be accurate this time, too.
Back in May, I wrote, apropos the very dilatory and incomplete official cleanup of companies incorporated by GT Group and associated company agents:
GT Group continues to register companies with that addressin Nayland Road, Stoke, New Zealand. Right now, there are 34 of them.There are also companies that the New Zealand Registrar of Companies missed, at a GT Group drop-off address, varianthere; that’s another 20 live companies in all.
A Tale of Two Markets: One for Wealthy Insiders, And Another For the Rest of Us Jesse’s Café Américain. Yikes!
The Internet of Things: Monopoly Capitalism vs. Collaborative Commons Jeremy Rifkin, HuffPo