Lev Leviev’s Empire: Diamonds and Real Estate Across the World
Denis Katsyv’s companies are closely connected to the business empire of Lev Avnerovich Leviev, the billionaire Israeli-Russian businessman whose empire stretches across the world.
Following the Magnitsky Money
As Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky slowly died in a Russian prison from abuse and neglect, US$230 million (5.4 billion Russian Rubles) in taxes stolen from his client disappeared into a maze of phantom companies, crooked banks and offshore accounts. Magnitsky, accused of the largest tax scam in Russian state history despite being the whistleblower who reported it, knew who pulled off the theft but not who the powerful people behind them were.
Latvia, a country on the coast of the Baltic Sea and a former part of the Soviet Union, has been at the heart of a number of informal networks of companies fronted by proxies that laundered money for criminal groups. Last year, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project looked at some of these companies in its series called the Proxy Platform. The tiny country supplied both the proxies and the banks through which hundreds of millions of dollars travelled through.
