$65m illegally wired out by Arabs

General Police Inspectorate on Tuesday announced a group of Arabs that controlled more than 89 companies had illegally transferred over $62 million and nearly 3 million euros from Romania to foreign banks between January – August 2003.

The money was wired out through the Voluntari, Mosilor, 13 Septembrie and Bucharest branches of the Romanian International Bank (RIB).

When contacted by Ziarul Financiar, RIB’s management neither dismissed the information nor provided any comment. RIB was bought by American businessman Daniel Roberts last year. The bank had been previously held by Summer Bank, which ended up taken over by the Turkish State in the aftermath of the financial and implicitly banking crisis in Turkey in 2000.

“Such operations are frequently reported by banks, as they are bound to do so under Norm 3, which stipulates they have to know their clients. The National Bank, for instance, files 3 or 4 reports with the National Office for Money Laundering Prevention and Fighting every week. As regards the situation at RIB, nobody at that bank is to blame for it. They practically carried out mere orders to transfer money from one account to another, which, after all, is in the nature of the banking activity. The regrettable thing is that such steps are taken only after many similar actions have occurred. I can’t see why we have to have 10 or 11 illegal transfers and only then start tracking the money down,” Nicolae Cinteza, head of the banking supervision department within NBR told Ziarul Financiar.

He says the basic issue, which has yet to go away, resides in the “illegal sources that generate this money.”

“The mechanism is simple. Money is illegally made and illegally wired abroad. How is it made illegally? We have imports that have not gone through customs for proper clearance, illegal VAT repayments from the budget, fictitious contracts for services provided abroad or advance payments,” Cinteza said. The group of Arabs that transferred the over $65 million abroad used a simple mechanism, too, as they employed 19 shell companies for the job, with a total of 89 involved in the operation. oana.nuta@zf.ro