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Arm’s-length: Uzbek tycoon with links to Putin pal and sanctioned Russian bank grabs strategic assets in Europe
LONDON–Eriell Group is the top oil and gas services company in Uzbekistan, but until recently, its corporate headquarters was in Jersey. The firm’s chairman continues to do multi-million euro deals in Europe despite Eriell’s close ties to sanctioned Gazprombank and, allegedly, Gennady Timchenko, a sanctioned oligarch and personal friend of Vladimir Putin. The Eriell parent…
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Reportercast October 2023 in Kyiv with Andrii Mikheiev: on asset confiscations and international law
A podcast episode recorded in Kyiv on October 17 on the sidelines of a conference on the human rights abuses in Ukraine and Syria, organised by SUN (The Syria Ukraine Network), an NGO based in the US. Andrii Mikheiev is an international law expert with the International Center for Ukrainian Victory, a Kyiv-based NGO. He…
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Reportercast September 2023 with Steve Middleton: on the Ulster Bank scandal
Steve Middleton is a financial adviser specialised in regulation and he has taken up the cause of Northern Irish business owners who accuse Ulster Bank (a subsidiary of NatWest group) of fraud. The allegations are only now coming to the fore but the issues date from the years around the great financial crisis of 2008…
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Reportercast August 2023 with Amazon’s Abigail Bishop on scams and other fraud
Abigail Bishop is Amazon’s “Head of External Relations, Scams Prevention” and her job is to campaign to educate Amazon’s customers about scams being run against them around the world. These scams are of multiple types and growing increasingly sophisticated, with Bishop citing low reporting rates as an additional issue. She also spoke to host Matei…
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Reportercast July 2023 with Valeriya Melnichuk, strategic advisor for Ukraine
Valeriya Melnichuk is a former BBC Monitoring journalist who has worked in the public relations department at the Ukrainian finance ministry during the intense period of the nationalization of PrivatBank and liquidation of numerous other smaller lenders which had been fraudulent or corrupt. Her boss at the time was finance minister Oleksandr Danylyuk, who Reportercast…
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Reportercast June 2023: with ex-Israeli military intelligence officer Yair Samban on terrorism financing
In this special one-year anniversary edition of our website and podcast, we dive deep into terrorism financing with field expert Yair Samban, who is currently a specialist consultant at Pegasystems, an IT company, and a former officer with Israeli military intelligence, tasked with analysing money flows to detect potential terrorists. Samban also wrote a book…
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Reportercast May 2023: On crypto gambling with Philip Newall and Maira Andrade
Investigative academics Philip Newall and Maira Andrade tell host Matei Rosca all about the intricacies of crypto gambling, a new type of gambling which has been found to pose risks both for consumers and the integrity of the financial system. They also discuss more broadly the latest regulations proposed by the UK government for gambling…
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Owner of Paxum, the fintech linked to Russia and Trump, donated to Ron DeSantis
LONDON–A man linked by US prosecutors to suspicious financing of a company belonging to Donald Trump has also made a substantial donation to Trump’s rival Ron DeSantis. Anton Postolnikov, with a given address in Miami Beach, Florida, appears on a public register of “friends of Ron DeSantis” as having given $30,000 on 29 March 2021…