While Washington Denies Any Problem, Swiss Probe “Missing” $4.8 Billion Loan To Russia

Offshore, Scoops  

Pacific News Service, Oct 16, 2000.

Washington denies any problem, as does the International Monetary Fund. But Russians who should know are sure that a $4.8 billion loan never reached its destination. They have been joined recently by Swiss prosecutors who are equally skeptical. PNS contributor Lucy Komisar is a freelance journalist who, sponsored by PNS, spent three months in Russia on a U.S. National Research Council grant to investigate the impact of offshore bank and corporate secrecy.

What really happened to the $4.8 billion?

Money Trail

Offshore, Scoops  

The Moscow Times, Oct 3, 2000

When news broke in August 1999 that somewhere from $7 billion to $15 billion had been spirited out of Russia through the Bank of New York, in what looked to U.S. investigators to be money laundering, American bankers professed shock. A month after those revelations, Bank of New York CEO Thomas Renyi told the U.S. House Banking Committee how dismayed I have been by the suggestions in the press that the Bank of New York has been involved in, or been used as a vehicle for, money laundering or other illicit activities.