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There are three Bulgarian banks that appear in the leaked reports of the US services to combat financial crime. Investbank, Piraeus Bank and the state-owned Bulgarian Development Bank have transactions worth more than $ 60 million, which experts have identified as doubtful.
This follows from a large-scale publication by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which is based on thousands of FinCEN documents.
The transfers were made between December 2010 and April 2017, and were processed by a bank in New York, which sent signals to authorities.
More than $ 31 million was received in Bulgaria and almost $ 32 million was sent from the country. The other countries involved in financial operations are Latvia, Cyprus and the Czech Republic. Six of the seven operations involve Piraeus (currently merged with Postbank in Bulgaria), most of which are related to the National Bank of Cyprus, which in 2013 was at the center of the crisis on the island. There is also a transfer from December 2010, which came from an account at the Commercial Bank of Latvia.
In November 2016, Piraeus and Encouragement Bank (transformed in 2008 into the Bulgarian Development Bank, but apparently appearing in the systems under its old name – br) carried out the largest of the dubious transactions – at $ 31 million they are transferred to its account in the state bank.
Investbank has issued $ 100,000 to a customer of the Checoslovak Bypass Bank.
The Bulgarian trace in FinCEN’s files comes from a sample of documents that contain sufficient information about the beneficiaries and other participants in the transactions.
Bulgaria is also represented in the list of large private clients, illuminated by information leaks, through Ruzha Ignatova and the One Coin scheme.
The website of Bivol, which is a partner in international investigation, points out that the documents mention our country as a high-risk country in terms of money laundering. Bulgaria is mentioned in more than 90 reports, and there are people and companies in our country, as well as foreigners who are related to our country.
The FinCEN files
Top-secret documents containing nearly $ 2 trillion in transaction information have been leaked and called FinCEN files. They reveal how some of the world’s largest banks have been involved in alleged money laundering schemes.
More than 2,500 documents are files sent by bank officials to the US Financial Crimes Authority, through which employees report suspicious actions to their clients.
Despite these signals, however, the transfers were approved by the banks and made it possible to erase the traces of criminal activity through which they were acquired.
Buzzfeed News distributed the data to more than 108 news organizations in 88 countries. Among them is the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The authors of the investigation emphasize that they have had access to a minimum of thousands of complaints of illegal transactions that bank employees file literally every day.
