The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [26]
Stevie remembered his sudden public announcement. It had had the clarity of purpose of someone who actually plans to do something: banks were very important to the economy, he’d explained. People needed to be confident that their money was in safe hands or it would remain wedged firmly under the bed. No confidence meant fear, and fear meant a lack of investment. The banks had to operate transparently; the money laundering would have to stop.
Money laundering is all about concealing the source of illegally earned cash—washing dirty money—and there are many ways to do it. One way is to set up shell companies that channel tainted cash through legitimate, high-cash operations, and then back to the first owner, therefore hiding where the original money came from, rendering it effectively clean.
While banks did not always know they were laundering money, in the past many had turned a blind eye to funds they knew to be dirty.
In the UK, the Proceeds of Crime Act had been designed to stop this; in the US, it was the Money Laundering Act. Kozkov was trying to bring the same degree of scrutiny and severity to a far more lawless banking environment.
He started out by imposing crippling fines on all banks caught laundering money, and then by seizing any profits made from the illegal money. While this was a very public statement that laundering was not acceptable behaviour, the banks kept operating, the paper trails too well obscured. So Kozkov began to shut any bank caught acting illegally, but still the banks refused to die. They just popped up under different names. He then decreed that anyone caught laundering money would be banned from the banking industry for life.
His enemies therefore were now: all the banks, and anyone who had ever profited, or intended to profit, from the laundering of money through them. The list was a driftnet of the powerful, including senior members of the Russian government.
Stevie had puzzled over why his nomination was approved in the first place—but then no one in power had known he would go after the banks so hard.
In 1998, Russia faced a financial crisis. The International Monetary Fund agreed to lend the country money only on the condition that Russia establish an independent central bank. Kozkov had been the IMF’s preferred candidate and he was subsequently appointed Head of the Central Bank. He spent his time poring through the accounts, combing through the tangles, talking to people. As he bothered no one, no one thought to replace him with someone more malleable. Then one day he emerged suddenly from the concrete chrysalis of his office and announced that everything was going to change—and it did.
The point was that Kozkov therefore was not a man to be suddenly seized by panic. He and his family had lived with a certain level of threat since his appointment, a good ten years ago. So what was going on? What were Henning and the family not telling her?
A plan involving some kind of action was needed fast because a) Stevie was starving and b) her curiosity—always a vulnerable point— was driving her wild. You’re good, Henning. I will give you that. You’re good, getting me hooked in like this. But don’t think you are going to get away with a thing.
Kozkov shook his head and spoke. ‘I’m sorry. I am a terrible host.
You must be hungry after your trip. We don’t have much, our cook had to leave us suddenly. But perhaps you would eat an omelette?’
Stevie smiled. ‘I would like that very much. Let me help.’ She wondered if they had got rid of the cook as a security precaution. Staff were a vulnerability. She followed Valery into the kitchen. Irina was already there.
The Kozkov kitchen cupboards were rather bare. It looked as if little more than tea had been made for days. Everything was exceptionally clean, Stevie noticed; probably Irina in a fit of