Scouts of other people's wallets

"Gazeta.Ru" A bureaucratic organization, even a forceful one, cannot exist without a fixed “front of work.” Hence the life-giving ideas of returning to control over purchases.

Russian regulatory authorities continue to fire control shots with blanks. The State Drug Control Agency, instead of actually fighting drug trafficking, preys on veterinarians and declares a cat in court to be an individual to whom drugs are allegedly sold. And the Financial Monitoring Committee, also known as financial intelligence, has finally found the main source of income gained from crime. The method of establishing the minimum costs from which any acquisition can be considered suspicious.

The Duma has introduced amendments to the law “On combating the legalization of proceeds from crime.” Formally, the author of the amendments is the Chairman of the Duma Banking Committee , United Russia Member Vladislav Reznik . Secretly, their authorship is recognized in the Financial Monitoring Committee (FMC). The purpose of the amendments is to restore control over large expenditures of citizens. The bill proposes to control all real estate transactions worth over 3 million rubles, as well as obtaining interest-free loans, purchasing securities for cash and currency transactions worth over 600 thousand rubles.

The motive behind the amendments is to combat the financing of terrorism. And, most importantly, the amendments dramatically expand the range of structures required to provide the FMC with information about such transactions. According to the current law, only banks are required to do this (let us recall that the failure to provide information about money allegedly passing through the bank, intended for the ransom of the kidnapped and murdered deputy general director of KamAZ Victor Faber, became the basis for the seizure of the license from Sodbiznesbank). Now it is proposed to oblige casinos, lawyers, notaries, realtors, insurance and trust companies, and sellers of precious stones and precious metals to report to financial intelligence about major transactions. Moreover, all these informants do not have the right to disclose the fact of transferring information about the above-mentioned transactions to financial intelligence.

The Financial Monitoring Committee was created after the visit of representatives of the Federal Tax Police Service, abolished during Kasyanov’s premiership, to France (by the way, before the appointment of the current Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov as head of this service ). There our tax police learned about the existence of financial intelligence within the structure of the French government. Moreover, in France, this body is exclusively engaged in collecting and analyzing information, cannot initiate criminal cases, and certainly does not collect information about casino regulars and jewelry stores from croupiers and sellers. In Russia, having subordinated financial intelligence on the French model to the Ministry of Finance , they now decided to make it, in fact, a law enforcement agency, a full-fledged intelligence service with a wide network of informants.

The main and only purpose of creating financial intelligence was to demonstrate to the West the desire of the Russian authorities to fight money laundering in the wake of scandals surrounding Russian business abroad (just remember the story with the Bank of New York). Russia really wanted to join the international organization against money laundering, FATF , and sought its exclusion from the blacklist of this organization. At the same time, the law “On combating the legalization of proceeds from crime” was adopted, which they now want to amend. Times have changed.

Russia joined the FATF and was removed from the blacklist. Russian financial intelligence cannot seriously deal with income obtained illegally, including through corruption.

~ Firstly, she is unable to fight such a system, and secondly, this is not what it was created for. However, any bureaucratic organization, even a power one, cannot exist without some fixed scope of work. Hence the life-giving ideas of a return to purchase control, which conveniently failed and was recently cancelled. Hence, by the way, the tireless struggle of the State Drug Control Service with veterinarians. Well, they really can’t fight the organized drug business. And here’s a holy thing: under the new law and its implementation, you can achieve an increase in the budget and avoid staff reductions. It is no coincidence that the head of the CFM , Viktor Zubkov , the former chief tax officer of St. Petersburg, was the first of the heads of federal departments, during a personal meeting with Putin, to achieve the retention of four positions for his deputies instead of the two required by the rules of administrative reform and agreed that he would not reduce a single staff position.

Nobody even thinks about how effective the measures and methods proposed by this retained staff of financial intelligence officers are.

Although the connection between buyers of jewelry and even, scary to say, people taking out an interest-free loan from a bank for 601 thousand rubles, with international terrorists is no more obvious than the connection between veterinarians who inject ketamine as an anesthetic to a cat with drug cartels.

It turns out that two such venerable departments, the creation of which also ensured solid employment for officials close to Putin, demonstrate to the outside world Russia’s readiness to go along with the civilized community, actively fighting drug trafficking and money laundering. And in their actual internal practice they are engaged in inventing very unburdensome functions that are not clear to anyone, wresting financial and personnel preferences from the state.