They could launder money. Ukrainians in FinCEN archives

Available to journalists were data from the United States Department of the Treasury for Combating Money Laundering, containing information on suspicious transfers totaling more than $ 2 billion.

Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, is the United States Treasury office that monitors suspicious financial transactions. Receive data on suspicious transactions from US banks, as well as from foreigners who have correspondent accounts with US banks; Such accounts must be maintained by the bank for transactions in US currency.

More than 2,100 reports of such suspicious transactions, totaling about 22,000 pages, have fallen into the hands of journalists from the US edition of BuzzFeed. The banks themselves send them to FinCEN. The publication emphasizes that these documents can be used in investigations, but are not in themselves evidence of crimes.

How does it work

If the bank suspects that the transaction refers to crimes such as money laundering, terrorist financing, arms or drug trafficking, it is obliged to inform FinCEN. Banks send thousands of such messages, so FinCEN doesn’t have time to process them. Messages can linger on FinCEN for years, waiting for US law enforcement to deal with a potential offender.

85% of the reports leaked by FinCEN Files were submitted by large international banks: JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon. The information in these reports referred mainly to the transactions of the smaller banks with their correspondent accounts.

Who is from ukraine

The published data contains information on 489 transactions with Ukrainian accounts totaling about $ 500 million.

So, from 2003 to 2017, American banks submitted 38 reports on 756 transactions by Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Firtash for a total of $ 2.37 billion.

In 2017, the US bank JPMorgan told FinCEN that during 2010-2015 it was conducting suspicious transactions related to Andrei Klyuev.

Among them, transfers of 230 million dollars to the former political adviser of the Party of Regions Paul Manafort. Some of these transfers were disguised by the fictitious companies in Klyuev and Manafort as computer buyers.

FinCEN data also mentions businessman Igor Kolomoisky. In particular, Bank of New York Mellon informed FinCEN in August 2017 that from 2012 to 2017 it conducted suspicious transactions totaling $ 263 million, involving Kolomoisky companies.

But it turns out that the big international banks report suspicious transactions, but have not yet refused to carry them out.

The FinCEN Files documents may become the subject of serious investigations in the United States, Ukrainian journalist Tatyana Kozyreva, who worked on the file, wrote on Facebook.

“Oligarchs, former officials and even presidents, most of them entered the FinCEN reports for a reason,” says Kozyreva.