Credit: Перша Шпальта
The warlord oligarch who supported Volodymyr Zelensky
by Casey Michel
March 17, 2022
The city of Cleveland, Ohio, is hardly considered the most cosmopolitan or globalised city in the U.S. If anything, the Rust Belt city – whose population is less than half of what it was a century ago – is a symbol of industrial decline across America’s heartland, for a region whose best days are clearly behind it.
Which is why, as other major American cities like New York or Miami opened their doors to all kinds of oligarchic money out of places like Russia or Ukraine, Cleveland hardly got any attention as a destination for the kinds of illicit wealth spilling out of the former Soviet Union. Investigators searched out ill-gotten gains in Manhattan and Malibu. They ignored Cleveland, assuming globe-trotting oligarchs would never bother with a Midwestern city in clear decline.
How wrong they were.
As investigators and authorities now know, one of the most notorious oligarchs out of the former Soviet space oversaw a trans-national money laundering scheme of historic proportions – and used places like Cleveland, in addition to a number of other small towns across the American Midwest, to hide and launder hundreds of millions of dollars.
Read More HERE
