Russian criminals use EU banks. Shock!

Given how many different bits of regulation the EU has imposed on its member states and how many other bits of legislation and regulation those member states imposed on their citizens, all in order to prevent money laundering, it may come as a surprise to readers of this blog to find out that none of them manage to prevent money, stolen from the Russian people and Russian businesses from being laundered through EU banks. Well, it may. Personally, whenever I hear stories like that I recall Captain Renault:

  Mind you, that wonderful scene also shows what a complete numpty Victor Laszlo was and how unlikely it was for the resistance to get anywhere under his idiotic leadership but that's another story.

Back to those EU banks and Russian money. Bear in mind that the EU makes all sorts of noises about the terrible state of affairs in Russia. The noises are not loud enough to make any difference. For instance the killers and torturers of Sergei Magnitsky, found guilty of "fraud" several years after his death, happily come and frolic in EU countries. This is known as sophisticated soft power that is different from the rough and tough American foreign policy (though we don't hear so much about that under Barack Obama's presidency.)

The next well known Russian dissident to go to prison will be the anti-corruption blogger and protest organizer, Alexei Navalny. To be fair, a number of other Russian dissident dislike him but that has ever been so. There are no dissident movements anywhere that do not spend more time fighting each other than the enemy.

Meanwhile Navalny is trying to tie up some lose ends before he is put out of action for six years if the prosecution gets its wish, which is quite likely as the judge in question has never presided over an acquittal.

On Tuesday (16 July), he, and his group of other young jurists, unveiled the secret business empire of Vladimir Yakunin [in Russian], a government official who runs Russian Railways, the country's state-owned train operator.

According to their information, Russian Railways has channelled millions upon millions of taxpayers' money into businesses owned by Yakunin's wife and two sons.

The businesses include hotel chains, blocks of flats and marine ports.

But the Yakunin connection is hidden behind layers of offshore firms, dozens of which are registered in EU member state Cyprus.

That would be the Cyprus that has recently been bailed out by the rest of the EU, I take it.

Here is the Yakunin story on the BBC Russian Service that is easily translated into English, on Forbes (ditto) and on Kommersant. Apart from EUObserver there seem to be no English-language media accounts. (Sorry, there is one, the Moscow Times.)

Navalny told EUobserver by email from Moscow on Tuesday that the EU's frequent statements on lack of rule of law in Russia "are, of course, a good thing."

But he is "sceptical" they will prompt change.

Instead, he urged EU authorities to help Russian people by enforcing rule of law in EU member states.

Or, in other words, by stopping Russian criminals from using European banks and offshore structures to conceal their ill-gotten gains.

Noting that the EU's joint police body, Europol, the European Commission and six EU countries are now investigating a money laundering trail linked to the death of Russian whistleblower-auditor Sergei Magnitsky, Navalny said: "This work is fundamentally important."

He added: "Stolen money was smuggled outside my country and re-invested in Europe … If the commission and Europol do their job properly, it will create an extremely important precedent."

He said the EU should go further, by creating new legal obligations for sensitive Russian investments.

It is always rather charming to see people from countries that are considerably more corrupt than the EU (believe it or not) look to that organization for some action rather than just pretty words in the battle they are waging. Sadly, I have to tell Mr Navalny (should he be reading this blog, which is not very likely) that the EU is not going to do anything to upset President Putin and his camarilla and neither will the member states, which is a good deal more shameful.

UPDATE: A day before expected, Alexei Navalny was sentenced to five years' imprisonment, allegedly for corruption but in reality for blogging against the Putin mafia and exposing their corruption. Self-pitying activists and members of the blogosphere, please note: this is what oppression looks like.

Somebody is scared of this man

Alexei Navalny, briefly mentioned on this blog before but written about at some length even by our media (and yours truly on Taki's Magazine) is not an anti-Putin candidate. He is a blogger and a political activist who has become the face and voice of the opposition to the corruption and political authoritarianism of the Putin-Medvedev regime. (Remember the old joke of Medvedev being Putin's мишка, that is, teddy bear? Non-Russian speakers need to know that medved or медведь means bear.)

It seems that Mr Navalny is beginning to bother the Putin brigade. They have decided to smear him with the obvious accusation that he has been associating with Snowball, errm, I mean the ex-patriate oligarch Berezovsky, who is wanted on all sorts of charges in Russia but whom the British courts refuse to hand over on the reasonable assumption that he is unlikely to receive a fair trial (or, possibly, a trial at all). Berezovsky and the unspecified oligarchs have been blamed for everything that has been going wrong in Russia, particularly for all opposition to the Putin regime in the time-honoured Soviet way. Shall we see people being tried for left-wing Berezovskyite deviationism?

Anyway, the picture of Navalny and Berezovsky appeared in a hand-out newspaper (not a fake as some of the Putinites have been shouting), called Argumenti if Fakti of the Urals ["Аргументы и Факты. Урал"]. According to this blog, 80,000 copies were handed out in Ekaterinburg (definitely in the Urals) by pro-Putin youngsters. In it [scroll down] was the infamous photo of Navalny and Snowball Berezovsky with a headline that says: "Alexei Navalny has never bothered to conceal that he was given money for his struggle with Putin by  the oligarch Boris Berezovsky". Cute, eh?

Sadly, the picture is a photoshopped one. How this takes one back to the Soviet shenanigans with photographs, so fascinatingly documented by David King. Sometimes people were added as in the infamous picture of Stalin allegedly sitting next to Lenin in the latter's last years in Gori; sometimes they were taken away when they became unpersons.

Enough of this reminiscing. Let us turn to the present. Navalny has managed to produce the original of the photograph in which he is with another oligarch but not one so well known, Mikhail Prokhorov. He then decided to help the other side out. Why not make a few suggestions of various other people he could be getting finance from, such as Stalin, Lord Voldemort, Napoleon or Putin himself. If your follow the link above and scroll down you will see the pictures and the Russian text is minimal.

The story has gone world-wide and was picked up by the BBC, the Telegraph,  the Guardian and many others with the appropriate semi-literate pro-Putin trolls making their appearance here and there.

Someone asked me whether these people really thought anyone would believe them. Probably not (and, strictly speaking, we still don't know who took that idiotic decision) but they worked on the principle of "mud sticks" and when it comes to Russia and opponents of Putin, too many people, especially in the West are ready to believe the worst, particularly if they see the dreaded word "oligarchs". Those are the people who do not seem to realize that oligarchs are alive and well in Russia but these days they are all Friends of Vladimir. All the same, one can't help wondering why the Putinites should be so scared of a man who is, after all, merely an anti-corruption blogger.