Legal Support for Counteracting Money-Laundering in Russia

Pavel Grigorievich Ponomaryov

1. A major means of ensuring regular functioning of a market economy and identifying reserves for increasing budget revenues is the application of specialized legislation on counteracting money-laundering. There is no such legislation in Russia today, although certain legal norms have been created (Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, Article 174), indicating the first specific steps in that direction.

2. The absence of a systematic specialized legislation in this field creates extremely favorable conditions in Russia for criminalization of economic relationships and makes it easy to put funds derived from drug trafficking, arms dealing, protection racketeering, and other criminal activities, typically organized at the national or international level, into domestic and international operations. This situation is a real threat to the economic security of both Russia and the United States.

3. Russian Federal draft laws on comprehensive efforts against money-laundering and on appropriate supplements to law-enforcement branches of law have been prepared by an interdepartmental working group, of which I am the leader, established pursuant to Directive No. 460-рп of the President of the Russian Federation, dated September 8, 1994. The group includes experts of the Interior Ministry, the Ministry of Justice, the Central Bank, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Federal Security Service, the Federal Tax Police Service, the State Customs Committee, the External Economic Activities Committee, and the State Tax Service of the Russian Federation.

4. The draft laws have been revised and modified many times and praised internationally by the FATF group and in the Memorandum on Money-Laundering Legislation of the US Department of Justice (Washington, 1995).

5. These draft laws are now in the State Duma of the Russian Federation, but their political fate looks difficult, since they are not supported by a number of parliamentary factions.

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