August 14, 2016
International gun-runners are using Scotland to launder their profits, Mafia watchers in the former Soviet Union have said. Organised criminals are increasingly exploiting secretive and obscure Scottish shell firms as fronts for everything from cyber-scams to the wholesale looting of banks. Now Mafia monitoring group CRiME has warned that Scotland has become a money-laundering factory for criminal gun-runners hiding behind SLPs.
Journalist Andriy Lavryk, who heads CRiME, said: “For some reason the interests of arms dealers from Ukraine, Russia and the Middle East – and their customers – are concentrated in Scotland.” Lavryk stressed how hard it is to get infallible information on Scottish arms links but confirmed that corrupt officials and businessmen from across the former Soviet Union – not just the so-called “arms Mafia” – use SLPs and other British “offshore structures”. He cites a source as saying: “All the arms dealers gather in Scotland. Arms billionaires live there.”