From Meduza:
On March 4, Meduza published an investigative report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) about an offshore empire that belongs to Ruben Vardianian, the former director of the investment bank Troika Dialog. Based on the same research, other major news outlets including The Guardian and Suddeutsche Zeitung published similar reports on Monday. The next day, across Europe, figures and institutions named in OCCRP’s materials found themselves under scrutiny. Meduza summarizes the immediate fallout from the “Troika Laundromat” investigation.Prince Charles“It is estimated that $4.6 billion was sent to Europe and the U.S. from a Russian-operated network of 70 offshore companies with accounts in Lithuania,” says The Guardian, explaining how money from different sources (many of which were not directly tied to criminal enterprises) was funneled through Troika Dialog to various recipients.Some of the money from this mixed pot of riches found its way to nonprofits operated by Prince Charles. Between 2009 and 2011, for example, the British Virgin Islands shell company Quantus transferred more than $200,000 to the Lithuanian bank account of the Prince’s Charities Foundation. According to the BBC, the money was donated for the restoration of a historical estate in southern Scotland.The Austrian bankOCCRP’s investigation identifies dozens of offshore ownership structures created by Troika Dialog. According to banking records, these enterprises funneled money from firms that are implicated in criminal cases involving billions of rubles allegedly laundered, cashed out, or otherwise unlawfully removed from Russia. According to OCCRP, some of the funds that passed through Troika Dialog’s offshore empire were the illegal tax refunds identified by Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergey Magnitsky, who died in jail in 2009 after police responded to his discovery by charging him with tax evasion....MORE
