Where Poroshenko & Ukraine publicly backed the wrong POTUS candidate with Clinton, with Trump winning Poroshenko needed a route back into US favour and has allegedly paid $400-600k back channel pay-to-play fee to Michael Cohen and stopped cooperating with Mueller on Paul Manafort to get a meeting with Trump where a $1bn US supplied coal & railway loco deal was agreed along with 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles thrown in.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44215656These fees are the tip of the iceberg compared to alleged $250m Rosneft stock placement brokerage fees paid via Qatar, where it breaks US sanctions on Russia, with a hiccup causing their Saudi / UAE ISIS crisis and almost war and the recent Chinese trade war settlement and ZTE sanctions pullback and the allegations of a $500m Chinese government loan facility for Trump Tower Indonesia along with another $500m Chinese bank facility which if true would break the US emolument laws.
This is still small fry the real big money and industry is turning the estimated 2-5% or higher of the $80tn global GDP or at least a $1.6tn to $4tn (higher estimates are $8-16tn) per year money laundering industry. For this you are looking for well connected international businesses with good links with the countries that need to get dirty money abroad including Russia, China, Europe, Middle Eastern and South American countries. The money can be stolen, the result of bribes and/or corruption, and other criminal activities, particularly smuggling (including people) and of course the global drugs trade. The businesses have a legitimate front and part which may well be the smaller profitable/loss making part of the business. The people involved will have 1000's of sub companies, many anonymously owned which obscure the path of the dirty money from its journey from dirty to clean and the use of either nominal value commodities like property and collectables or cash based ones like casinos and things like major city taxi businesses. The owners of the dirty money can then use it as clean money (less the laundering fees) to invest in safe Western businesses and shares, property, children's education an opulent lifestyle and any political objectives. Not surprisingly the global money laundering hubs are also the premier global financial centres of New York and London.
The West is slowly clamping down with the US from this month having much tighter scrutiny of money going trough businesses and the UK is creating a register of beneficial owners of anonymously owned companies. The UK Government this week has published this report on Russian money.
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmfaff/932/932.pdfIf Special Investigator Robert Mueller III, as expected, blows the lid on this the repercussions are going to be global. 25 indictments so far and 2 jail sentences, and this is the tip of the iceberg.
The Trump part of it will make Watergate look like a parking violation.
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Topic: Pay to Play (Read 1289 times)