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A billion-dollar money-laundering network operating across the UK purchased a bank in Kyrgyzstan to help Russia evade Western sanctions and channel funds towards the Ukraine war, British police said Friday.
The network has used hundreds of couriers in at least 28 UK towns and cities to collect criminal cash from drug dealing and firearms trafficking, among others.
The money was then quickly converted into cryptocurrency and moved around the world, Britain’s National Crime Agency (NCA) said, as it shared an update on the latest phase of the UK-led “Operation Destabilise”.
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The international effort has now led to 128 arrests and the seizure of more than £25 million ($32.7 million) in cash and cryptocurrency in the UK, the NCA said.
In the past year, another 45 suspected launderers have been arrested and £5.1 million seized. Intelligence from the probe has also helped foreign partners seize $24 million and €2.6 million overseas.
Two Russian-speaking networks, called Smart and TGR, are at the heart of a lot of the transfers, the NCA said.
They launder money for transnational crime groups involved in cybercrime, drugs and firearms smuggling and help their Russian clients illegally bypass financial restrictions to invest money in Britain.
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Kyrgyzstan connection
During “phase two” of “Operation Destabilise” which began in December, authorities discovered some of the laundered funds were routed through the bank in Kyrgyzstan, called Keremet Bank.
This was secretly bought on Christmas Day 2024 by Altair Holding SA, a company linked to TGR boss George Rossi.
Keremet then helped move money for Promsvyazbank (PSB), a Russian state-owned bank that supports companies involved in Russia’s military-industrial sector, the NCA said.
The US Treasury had also pointed the finger at Keremet in January for helping the Kremlin evade sanctions.
“For the first time, we are tying … drugs trades in our community all the way through to the highest levels of organised crime, geopolitics, sanctions evasion, the Russian industrial, military complex and state-linked activity,” said the NCA’s deputy director for economic crime Sal Melki.
The networks operated at “eye-watering scales”, he added.
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Most of the UK activity relied on couriers who drive around the country collecting bags of cash and swapping them for cryptocurrency payments, sometimes in car parks by motorways.
In an effort to deter them, the NCA has launched a campaign with posters and online messages in English and Russian posted nationwide, including at motorway service stations, warning couriers that they face long prison sentences for relatively small pay.
“For a few hundred pounds, there is a very good chance you could be going to prison for over five years,” Melki said.
“Easy money leads to hard time.”
The NCA believes that couriers are a weak point that they can target.
But the threat from networks like these remains high.
“The NCA has inflicted a serious wound on these organisations,” Melki said. “But they’re also others like them, and we know that we’ve got to sustain the pressure. We’ve got to keep arresting people, prosecuting people, sanctioning people.”
(FRANCE 24 with AFP)
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