RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:Multiple thoughts.
Russian oligarchs, Putin, dirty money, US real estate, and Russian funded Trump SuperPacs
"The dominant destination of anonymous investment is real estate, which has both great capacity and desired secrecy. Every year, more than $100 billion of foreign funds flow into US real estate, more than half of it in cash. The investigative journalist Oliver Bullough found that “almost one-third of top-end property purchases in America’s biggest cities are suspect, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the body at the Treasury Department.”
"Dirty Russian investment in real estate appears to abound in New York and Florida.
One Reuters investigative report found that “at least 703—or about one-third—of the owners of the 2044 units in the seven Trump buildings [in Sunny Beach Isles in Florida] are limited liability companies, or LLCs, which have the ability to hide the identity of a property’s true owner. And the nationality of many buyers could not be determined.” But the “zip code that includes the Sunny Isles buildings has an estimated 1,200 Russian-born residents . . . U.S. Census data show.”
The project generated $2 billion in initial sales, of which at least sixty-three individuals with Russian passports or addresses had bought at least $98.4 million worth of property, while the more dubious Russians are to be found in the LLCs.
The situation is similar in the United Kingdom. James Nickerson of the New Statesman cited the assessment that anonymous offshore companies own thirty-six thousand properties in London at an estimated value of $156 billion. Russians own a large share of this real estate. In May 2016, David Cameron lamented that ninety-nine thousand buildings in the United Kingdom had anonymous owners. A third major entry point for tainted funds into the United States is law firms. The legal excuse is attorney-client privilege, which is supposed to keep communication between an attorney and his or her client secret, but the United States has extended this secrecy to unlimited money flows. "