Official says not all foreign financing of nonprofit firms good

MOSCOW, Mar 11 (PRIME) -- The Federal Financial Monitoring Service is interested in the nature of about 80 billion rubles that came to the non-profit organizations from abroad, Director Yury Chikhanchin told President Vladimir Putin at a Monday meeting.

“I would like to say some words about the nonprofits. Foreign financing is still coming here, and not all of that is coming for noble causes. We are tracking about 80 billion (rubles), we are trying to understand them,” he said.

The service is working on each suspicious nonprofit organization together with the Federal Security Service. “There are directions and sectors that receive the bulk of financing, I mean the sphere of education, educational institutions and so on,” he said.

The financial monitoring service and the Investigative Committee proved legalization of U.S. $350 stolen million through Probusinessbank before the central bank launched a bailout there.

“We did good work with the Investigative Committee. I would name two cases. One of them is Probusinessbank. We’ve worked with 27 countries trying to search for the assets. We’ve managed to find them and arrest them, and we are now returning some of them…Regarding legalization, the most important thing here is that we’ve managed to prove that legalization amounted to about $350 million, I mean that they did not simply steal the money, but legalized it as well,” he said.

The service, the Federal Security Service, the Interior Ministry, and the central bank closed 27 websites for laundering 245 billion rubles of shady money in 2018, he said.

The service’s joint work with the central bank is reducing the amount of shady operations in the country, but the fight is far from being over. The monitoring activity has significantly reduced the withdrawal of money to offshores as well, he said, while Putin said that the withdrawal shrank twice in 2018 as compared with 2016.

Chikhanchin also said that Russia has exchanged its “list of terrorists” whose assets were frozen with 12 countries. “We have given (the list of) about 1,500 names to the Central Asian countries, France and so on,” he said, adding that 40 countries united around Russia’s international project for fighting financing of the Islamic State.

Putin also told Chikhanchin that the service should pay close attention to the companies that fulfill contracts under the state defense order and are also involved in shady operations. The service managed to reduce the amount of fictitious companies that work with the defense order by 25%, but that this is not enough, Putin said.

(65.9646 rubles – U.S. $1)

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