From Mongabay, March 4, 2020:
- A Mongabay investigation has
traced the rise and fall of a billion-dollar commodities cartel in
Eastern Europe, finding it relied on money laundering, tax avoidance and
state capture.
- Over more than six months reporters
reviewed hundreds of court filings, corporate and property records, and
carried out interviews with those involved to reveal how the deals were
done and where the money went.
- Despite mounting
evidence of impropriety by the group, major development banks continued
to fund its projects, lending legitimacy to its operations.
(Illustrations by Yana Adamovic.)
CHISINAU, Moldova — Many men have regretted their friendship with Yuri Drukker.
Born to Jewish parents in what is now Ukraine at the close of the
Second World War, Drukker narrowly escaped the Holocaust. He trained as
an agricultural engineer before emigrating to the United States in 1988,
spending the next 25 years forging a commodities trading empire that
spanned the former communist world and in its heyday turned over almost
$1 billion annually. By the early 2000s, however, the little-known
company Drukker built, the WJ Group, began to tear itself apart — but
not before he and his associates secreted away millions of dollars in
Miami and New York real estate through a sprawling web of shell
companies.
This is the previously untold story of WJ’s rise and that of its
rival, Trans-Oil, which critics describe as a monopoly that is
exploiting Moldovan smallholders already struggling amid regular
environmental shocks prompted by climate change.
Though Drukker has undeniable business acumen, by piecing together
his story from hundreds of previously unreported court records, emails,
corporate data and interviews with those involved, a Mongabay
investigation has found his activities and those of his associates were
partly enabled by money laundering, tax avoidance, extortion and the
co-option of senior political figures in a bid to capture emerging
democracies’ core agricultural markets. What is more, they did it all
with the financial backing of some of the world’s leading development
banks.
Of the many countries in which WJ operated, its tale played out
nowhere more fully than in the former Soviet republic of Moldova, a
landlocked nation of 3.5 million people sandwiched between Ukraine and
Romania.
But it begins a world away, in Brooklyn.....
....MUCH MORE
