Is Vladimir Putin the Richest Man in the World?
By Dan Blystone

A number of compelling but unsubstantiated reports over recent years have suggested that Russian president Vladimir Putin has secretly amassed a personal fortune of as much as $200 billion, far greater than the personal wealth of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates who currently sits at the top of the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires with a net worth of $77 billion. In this article we’ll review some of the sources supporting the notion that Putin could unofficially be the richest man in the world.

Shares in Oil and Gas Companies

Political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky has claimed that Putin could be worth as much as $70 billion, with shares in major oil and gas companies including a 4.5% stake of national gas giant Gazprom and 37% of oil supplier Surgutneftegas.
Belkovsky alleges that while Putin's name does not appear as a shareholder, his holdings are concealed behind a non-transparent chain of offshore companies and funds. Putin defenders point out that there is no clear evidence that Putin actually owns stakes in Surgutneftegaz or Gazprom and that many reports of Putin’s wealth hang on the single unproven assertions of Belkovsky.

Palace, Yacht and Watches

Often painted in the press as a modern day Tsar, Vladimir Putin is rumoured to own a $35 million yacht named Olympia, a billion dollar palace on Russia's Black Sea coast and an extravagant watch collection including a Tourbograph watch made by A Lange & Sohne worth over a half million dollars.
The 57-metre Olympia yacht was reportedly a gift from the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Dmitry Skarga is a former Kremlin employee living in the UK who claims to have managed the yacht. In a BBC Panorama documentary called Putin’s Secret Riches, Skarga said that while the yacht had been given to an offshore company, the real owner was Putin and that it was maintained using state funds. The Kremlin strenuously denies the allegations and press secretary Dmitry Peskov stated: “the contents of this BBC film, this is a pure fiction and libel, which has no grounds whatsoever.”

Putin’s Banker

Sergei Pugachev is a former politician and financier, once dubbed as "Putin’s banker" for his close connection to the Russian president.
After his relationship with Putin soured he fled from Russia and he is currently living in exile in the south of France.
In an interview with the Guardian Pugachev explained his view, saying: “Putin considers everything on Russian territory as his own...any attempts to find some foreign account, they are doomed to fail, because currently Putin considers as his own everything owned by Gazprom, Rosneft, private companies. Therefore, it is quite possible that he is the richest person in the world, until the moment that he loses power.” Pugachev claims that he was stripped of his business assets, while the Kremlin has accused him of owing hundreds of millions of dollars to the liquidator of Mezhprombank, a bank which he co-founded.

U.S. Treasury

When asked by the the BBC whether Putin is corrupt, Adam Szubin of the U.S. Treasury did not mince his words - replying “in our view, yes”. Szubin stated: “He supposedly draws a state salary of something like $110,000 a year...that is not an accurate statement of the man’s wealth and he has longtime training and practices in terms of how to mask his actual wealth.” Szubin also said that the United States had been aware of Putin’s corruption for “many, many years”.

Bill Browder

Bill Browder is the co-founder of the investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, formerly Russia's largest foreign investor. Referring to Putin’s net worth in a 2015 interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria, he said: “I believe that it's $200 billion. After 14 years in power of Russia, and the amount of money that the country has made, and the amount of money that hasn't been spent on schools and roads and hospitals and so on, all that money is in property, bank - Swiss bank accounts, shares, hedge funds, managed for Putin and his cronies.”

The Bottom Line

The documents recently leaked by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) known as the Panama Papers revealed how public officials from a number of countries conceal their wealth and have again raised the issue of corruption among world leaders.
Although Putin is not directly named in the papers, the documents show that a number of his associates moved as much as $2 billion through banks and offshore firms. The Kremlin has called the ICIJ revelations "a series of fibs", but the papers raise renewed questions over Putin’s alleged wealth and kleptocratic regime. (For more, see: Panama Papers Reveal The Secrets Of Dirty Money)

Panama Papers Tip of the Iceberg: Congress Aids Tax Cheats & Terrorists
By David Cay Johnston | Updated April 06, 2016

The Panama Papers revealed this week how billions of dollars secretly moved around the world to benefit a Saudi king, the president of Argentina, the prime minister of Iceland (who resigned Tuesday because of them), allies of Russian President Vladimir Putin and about 120 other politicians, along with business owners and professional athletes.

But that’s just money porn and political secrets from 11 million leaked documents spanning 39 years created by Mossack Fonseca, a law firm with offices in Panama and 38 other countries, that specializes in helping clients hide money.

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung shared the firm’s leaked files through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. The real scandal revealed by more than 100 journalists in a year-long collaborative project ­­­­that teased hidden connections among the global elite from those files, lies in something much bigger and more sinister.

Fascinating as the details are, they show us only what took place in one room, the Mossack Fonseca room, of what can be thought of as a sprawling mansion of corruption.

It is a mansion that major governments can demolish through laws, regulations and investigations. Yet decade after decade the mansion expands while Congress restricts the budget to pursue illicit cash flows and at least three states pass laws that help the crooks.

Mossack Fonseca says it did nothing illegal. We have good reason to doubt that, as we shall see.

Congress has known about such offshore cash abuses for decades. I first wrote about corrupt offshore accounts four decades ago, when the story was far from new.

Yet solving this problem is neither difficult nor hard. Still, the American government, so far, has generally said no dice.

The value in the leaked documents is that they put faces, famous and powerful faces, on what until now has been an abstract issue.

Gerard Ryle, the consortium director, said that “for the first time we are seeing at scale and almost on a day-by-day basis from 1977 until the end of 2015” how 12 current and former world leaders and others secretly transferred and hid as much as $200 million in a single transaction.

Jack Blum, a former Senate investigator who spent decades exposing global financial abuses and who assisted the journalists, told me the hidden money system prospers because major banks and their “lawyers in New York and London hand off the dirty work to this firm and others like it that operate in jurisdictions where there is no rule of law or no one worries about enforcement.”

***

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which represents countries with modern economies, reached an agreement in 2014 on sharing information across borders to catch crooks and terrorists.

But while countries around the world signed, the United States has not. Neither has Panama, though an earlier bilateral tax treaty may explain why so few Americans were listed in the Panama Papers.

Worse, state lawmakers in Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming have passed laws that help embezzlers, drug lords, kleptocrats, Mafia bosses and other crooks.

These three states let crooks create companies without revealing their names. They do this by paying fronts, known as nominees, a practice neatly explained in the consortium’s reports.

When the FBI, IRS, SEC or lawyers for estranged spouses, business partners and others hunt for hidden money, these three states protect the crooks with an impenetrable legal barrier to learning the identities of the true owners. Think of these laws as the State Thieves, Embezzlers And Liars (STEAL) Protection Acts.

These same laws and lax federal enforcement make it easy for terrorists to send money to finance bombings and other attacks.

Federal financial flow controls are so slipshod that the W-8BEN-E, an IRS form to identify foreign owners so their U.S. dividends and other American income can be taxed, does not accurately line up with the disclosure regulations. That creates a loophole big enough to slip billions of illicit dollars out of the country undetected.

While the Mossack Fonseca law firm says it did nothing illegal, the leaked documents reveal that it sent an employee to Nevada to hide and destroy records in 2014. An employee identified only as Andres was sent “to Nevada (and) cleaned up everything and he brought all the documents to Panama.”

That occurred after Jürgen Mossack, a named partner, testified under oath that his Panama City law firm did not “control the internal affairs or daily operations” of its Nevada business that created shell corporations using nominees to hide the identities of actual owners.

The law firm told the investigative reporters, despite the email, that it never destroyed or hid documents relevant to any investigation or litigation.

Blum, the former Senate investigator, told me, “The overarching problem is lawyers and business planners in places that purport to be subject to the rule of law simply hand off all the dirty work to people in the offshore world who are not subject to any law or operate in jurisdictions where nobody is likely to do anything to enforce the law.”

The United States, Blum added, “deliberately protects this system. Treasury refuses to even endorse requiring disclosure of beneficial ownership information on corporations” formed under the laws of those three states.

Congress has the power under the interstate commerce clause to require such disclosure.

***

The IRS employs America’s top experts at chasing money. But since 2004 it has not gotten nearly as much money as it says it can effectively use to pursue terrorist finance.

That’s when the George W. Bush administration rejected a request for an additional $12 million to pursue terrorist finances at a time when American troops were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and the administration warned another terrorist attack could come at any time.

That $12 million, a 50% increase in the tiny budget of the terrorist finance hunters, is a trivial sum by federal budget standards, but the White House and Treasury told me back then it was too much of a burden for American taxpayers to bear and other priorities took precedence.

Since Congress, the British Parliament and other legislative bodies possess abundant power to prevent undetected cash movements across borders, to expose the account owners and to pursue the civil and criminal misconduct exposed in the leaked documents an obvious question arises. Why do they let the hidden money system flourish?

The Constitution’s commerce clause gives our Congress the power to regulate banks and cash flows. It can deny access to American banks and money transfer systems to countries and institutions that help hide corrupt money. And it can fund investigations large enough and loud enough to scale the problem back from an Amazon of corrupt cash to a trickle.

But big banks, many of them named in the Panama Papers, and white-shoe law firms rake in big fees helping hide money. As Blum noted, they do some of the work, then hand off the illegal aspects to firms in countries where tax fraud, money laundering and hiding assets are perfectly legal or the laws go unenforced.

So why does Congress not act? Because it values the easy revenue for the banks and their lawyers more than the integrity of the world financial system and – though unintentionally – more than protecting you from terrorist plots.

Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of an IRE medal and the George Polk Award, David Cay Johnston is author of five books and the upcoming The Prosperity Tax: A New Federal Tax Code for the 21st Century Economy. He is a Distinguished Visiting Lecturer at Syracuse University College of Law and Whitman School of Management, and also writes for The Daily Beast and Tax Notes.

This essay first ran in The Daily Beast.

Никой не знае колко и какво притежава Путин реално. Освен службите, разбира се.