Global Witness is today revealing evidence that numerous UK companies appear to have helped facilitate a major money laundering scandal centred on a bank in Central Asia. Grave Secrecy, launched today, shows how urgent action is needed to address the current ease with which the UK and other major economies are used to launder the proceeds of corruption, tax evasion and other crimes.
Grave Secrecy exposes how billions of dollars of suspicious transactions at AsiaUniversalBank, Kyrgyzstan’s largest bank until April 2010, involved UK, New Zealand and Bulgarian-registered companies.
“It is so easy to set up a secretive ‘shell’ company in the UK and elsewhere that criminals, terrorists and corrupt politicians can easily move money around the world with impunity,” said Tom Mayne, a Global Witness campaigner. “Not only that but you can do this perfectly legally. This denies citizens of poor countries the chance to lift themselves out of poverty and leaves them dependent on aid,” continued Mayne.
The report reveals:
- That three UK companies had US$1.2 billion running through their accounts despite not being involved in any real business that Global Witness could ascertain.
- That the suspicious transactions went through many banks around the world, with the largest amounts passing through Citibank in New York, the UK’s Standard Chartered and Austria’s Raiffeisen Zentralbank. These banks continued their relationship, though one bank, UBS, was sufficiently concerned about their relationship with the Kyrgyz bank that it broke off relations….
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Link to Grave Secrecy report : click here