The FBI released Russian generals
without documents
The trip of a group of high-ranking Russian law enforcement officials to the United States to familiarize themselves with documents on laundering funds of the Russian mafia at the Bank of New York ended ingloriously. The FBI treated the Russians with obvious distrust and did not show any documents incriminating high-ranking Russian officials. From which our intelligence services concluded that the Americans simply do not have such documents.

The Russian delegation, consisting of generals from the Prosecutor General's Office, the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, did not come to the United States to assist in the investigation. Our intelligence services pursued a different goal: to find out whether there was real evidence of laundering funds from the IMF and other international financial organizations at the Bank of New York, and whether high-ranking Russian officials were involved in the scandal. However, according to the head of the delegation, Deputy Director of the FSB of the Russian Federation Viktor Ivanov, during consultations with the FBI, the Russians’ request for evidence was not satisfied. The Americans only hinted that a number of Russian commercial banks and firms were involved in money laundering through the Bank of New York.
Meanwhile, the FBI turned out to be more frank with journalists than with its colleagues from Russia. As a result, the latest results of the scandal investigation appeared in the Wall Street Journal. According to this publication, $300 thousand paid for the release of Russian citizen Eduard Olevinsky from Chechen captivity passed through the Bank of New York. In addition, million-dollar transfers from Russian banks through Benex (a Bank of New York client) went to such well-known companies as Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Nestle and Motorola.
The FSB believes that American detectives were faced not with the Russian mafia, but with the usual evasion of taxes and customs duties in Russia (Kommersant wrote about this on September 8 of this year). However, the Russian tax police do not yet have documentary grounds to initiate criminal cases on these facts. It seems that they will not appear in the near future: in the midst of a visit to the United States by a delegation of Russian law enforcement agencies, one of the heads of Interpol admitted that asking Russian colleagues for help was useless and even dangerous for the investigation, since classified information could “leak” to potential defendants. There was no refutation: in Russia no one is offended by such accusations anymore.

CRIME DEPARTMENT

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 171 dated September 21, 1999, p. 1