Bank of New York
Faces Money Laundering Charges

Alexander Cockburn, FirstPost.co.uk

Don’t mess with Russia
is the message as customs claim $22.5bn from Bank of New York

On July 3, the very eve of America's
annual celebration of Independence Day, a Moscow courtroom sizzled with acrid
testimonials to the effect that the oldest bank in the US is internationally
accountable on charges of money laundering and, if convicted, will have to pony
up $22.5bn to the Russian Customs Service, said sum representing just over a
third of the bank's capital.
The outfit in question is the indubitably venerable Bank of New York,
founded in 1784 by investors including Alexander Hamilton, first US Secretary of the Treasury, Aaron Burr (who
later killed Hamilton
in a duel) and the Bank of England. At least part of the start-up capital was
money filched from a public works scheme to clean up Manhattan's drinking water.
Today BNY–Mellon, as it's formally known, is

a huge private bank catering to blue chip companies and clients
round the world.
In the early 1990s, BNY scented opportunity in Russia
and soon became a favoured port of call for customers in the former Soviet Union eager to dispatch very large sums of money
overseas. Assisting BNY in this hospitable activity was a Russian couple, Peter
Berlin and his wife Lucy Edwards, who finally removed from the Russian Federation and settled in New York. In 1996 Peter
set up a couple of companies, Benex and BECS, with accounts at the BNY Branch
at One Wall St,
Lower Manhattan.
For the next three years, astoundingly large sums sluiced into these
accounts, remitted from Moscow
by a Russian enterprise called Depositarno Kliringovy Bank (DKB), for whom
Peter and Lucy were acting as front operators, in a money-laundering operation
of the utmost simplicity. Between 1996 and 1999, $7.5bn flowed into the BNY
accounts. [more]