270 Million Euros, Dirty Money

Hungary and Turkey are the main countries from which the greatest amounts of illegal money got into Romania.

From Hungary came 16.7 million euros, Turkey sent 16.4% millions as well, in percentages 29% and 28% respectively of all the illegal money this year. The hierarchy set by the National Bureau for Preventing and Combating the Money Laundry (NBPCML) also has countries from which the illegal money came into the country: Switzerland with 7.2 million euros, the USA, with 7.1 million euros, Germany, with 3.6 millions, and other states, whose sums are insignificant. As a total, from the beginning of the year until now, the estimated sum of illegal money that entered the country is 60 million euros.

THE CHINESE AND THE IRAQI. The Romanians are half of the persons thought to be the authors of the money laundry, but the Iraqi and the Chinese come strong from behind. The number of the suspects in this segment in Romania is 873 (from the beginning of this year).

MONEY GONE. During this year 210.5 million euros have illegally left Romania. The most important sums that "went" out of our country are 43.6 million euros - money gone in China - , 19.1 million euros in Turkey and 17.5 millions in Egypt.

FINED BANK

NBPCML has started, during the past days, for the first time, a professional checking of more subsidiaries of an important commercial bank in Romania.

The checking has been made based on a report of the National Bank of Romania (NBR), from which one can see that the respective bank didn’t report the suspect transactions, from the money laundry point of view (greater than 10,000 euros), as it should, for a long time.

The checking resulted into 100 million lei fines for the respective bank.

Translation: SORIN BALAN