Posted on 05/01/2002 12:04:17 PM PDT by Ivan the Terrible
Last week, a Swiss prosecutor found former Kremlin aide and present Secretary General of the Union between Russia and Belarus, Pavel Borodin, guilty of money laundering. Prosecutor Bernard Bertossa convicted Borodin and ordered him to pay a fine of 300,000 Swiss francs ($177,000).
Switzerland issued an international arrest warrant for Borodin in December 1999 on suspicion of laundering up to $30 million linked to a lucrative Kremlin renovation contract awarded to two Swiss-based construction companies.
He was arrested in New York in January 2001 and extradited to Switzerland in early April. After spending a few days behind bars, he was freed on $5 million bail, which was paid by the Russian Federation government.
As the Russian press reported, the bail was paid under the direct order of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in 1996-1997 worked in a Kremlin office as Borodin's first deputy before his appointment by former President Yeltsin as chief of the Russian Federal Security Service (the main KGB successor in domestic spying).
According to reports, at the time Putin himself was directly involved in money laundering connected with the Kremlin restoration project and in other criminal activity on behalf of Boris Yeltsin and his family members.
If the reports are true, it is no surprise that last year the Russian government decided to pay the $5 million bail to free Borodin from the Swiss jail.
It was feared that if kept behind bars he might release information about corruption at the top level of the Russian government, including data about Putin's connections with criminal activity in the Kremlin and prior to that in the St. Petersburg administration, where he was in charge of international business operations.
In an effort to keep secret the Kremlin leaders' connections with Mafia operations, Russian authorities will not surrender alleged arms dealer Victor Bout, now wanted on an Interpol warrant for trial in Belgium, to international law enforcement agencies.
Mr. Bout and his associates reportedly have supplied arms to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, some of which are now being used against the U.S. and allied forces in the eastern Afghan town of Gardez.
According to the Russian media, the evidence compiled against Bout is overwhelming and confirms that his group is probably the largest arms trafficking network in the world. Besides Afghanistan, it delivers large and small weapons to all of Africa's major conflict zones and has worked on behalf of the terrorist Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines as well as for Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
The Bout group operates or has operated in criminal cells in the United Arab Emirates, Belgium, Russia, the U.S., Rwanda, South Africa, Swaziland, Uganda, Angola and Liberia, among other places.
An interesting point: At the exact time Russian law enforcement officials were claiming that Victor Bout was not even in Russia, he himself was publicly proclaiming his innocence at a press conference very near the headquarters of the prosecutor general.
We know that since the end of the Cold War, the most powerful Russian criminal organizations – some with many thousands of members – have emerged on the world stage.
They are engaged in numerous forms of criminal activity, ranging from the trafficking of drugs, people and arms, to large-scale money laundering, financial crimes and embezzlement.
Russian organized crime is also involved in the smuggling of nuclear, radioactive and biological materials, and has known associations with international terrorist organizations dedicated to the destruction of the United States.
In the last three years alone, Russian authorities report that they have broken up 600 nuclear-smuggling deals, many involving established criminal syndicates. But until now we did not have any idea about how many other such deals may have succeeded.
There is no doubt that this criminal activity could not continue without the support of the highest-level bureaucrats in Russia's political establishment, people who are building their wealth on the blood of innocent Americans and other people.
The danger emanating from Russia's Mafia to the civilized world is no longer merely a Russian domestic problem. It needs to be handled in the same way we are handling international terrorism.
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