Where we politely ignore criminality

Vedomosti

The unearthing of a massive Russian moneylaundering scheme that moved $4.8 billion from Russia to Europe and the U.S. made headlines around the world last week, said Maria Zheleznova. Apart, that is, from here in Russia, where the story was all but ignored. From 2006 to 2013, an arm of Russian investment bank Troika Dialog used more than 70 offshore companies to mix its clients’ potentially dirty assets with other wealth in a series of complicated transactions designed to obscure the source of the cash. Of course, nobody in Russia is “willing to come out and defend Troika outright.” But nobody is exactly condemning the bank, either. Perhaps that’s because the sheer “variety of Russian

subjects and personalities involved is so impressive.” The investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an international consortium of journalists, revealed that at least

$69 million went to companies linked to President Vladimir Putin’s dear friend Sergei Roldugin, the cellist and businessman. The report also features Moscow’s Sheremetyevo International Airport, the relative of a regional governor, and the list goes on. Sberbank, which bought Troika in 2013, says only that it has nothing to do with the affair. The silence on the part of Russia’s business community “speaks more eloquently about the situation in the country than the investigation itself.”