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Russians Liquidating Crypto in the UAE To Seek Safe Havens (financialpost.com) 58

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Crypto firms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are being deluged with requests to liquidate billions of dollars of virtual currency as Russians seek a safe haven for their fortunes, Reuters is reporting, citing company executives and financial sources. From the report: Some clients are using cryptocurrency to invest in real estate in the UAE, while others want to use firms there to turn their virtual money into hard currency and stash it elsewhere, the sources said One crypto firm has received lots of queries in the past 10 days from Swiss brokers asking to liquidate billions of dollars of bitcoin because their clients are afraid Switzerland will freeze their assets, one executive said, adding that none of the requests had been for less than $2 billion.
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Russians Liquidating Crypto in the UAE To Seek Safe Havens More

Russians Liquidating Crypto in the UAE To Seek Safe Havens

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  • Blooded money... (Score:3)

    by Lavandera ( 7308312 ) on Monday March 14, 2022 @04:28PM (#62357553)

    They profitted from bloody regime killing Chechens, Georgians, Ukrainians and their own citizens...

  • Aaah, the real owners of Bitcoin emerge (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bubblyceiling ( 7940768 ) on Monday March 14, 2022 @04:34PM (#62357577)
    I was just wondering this last week. Well I guess now we know who owns Bitcoin

  • And by Russians they probably don't mean the 99.99% of Russians that aren't corrupt aparatchiks...

  • For the sheer number of Jewish Russian Oligarchs with automatic citizenship, this is certainly unscientific. The Times looked at how Israel's legalised money laundering for "new citizens" and actively prevents outsiders, such as America, from investigating the money trail. But those willy Arabs and Swiss, well, thanks to pop culture, we all know how evil they are.

    • The Times looked at how Israel's legalised money laundering for "new citizens" and actively prevents outsiders, such as America, from investigating the money trail.

      "prevent" is a bold claim. If the US really wants to investigate the activities of Russian oligarchs, it probably needs the cooperation of Russian authorities, not of Israeli authorities. Most likely, their headquarters are located in Russia.

      Besides, when former government officials from other countries come to the US with their stolen millions/billions, the US welcomes them with open arms.

      [...]

      American authorities are supposed to vet visa applicants to make sure they are not under active investigation on criminal charges. But the ProPublica examination shows that this requirement has been routinely ignored.

      One of the most prominent cases involves a former president of Panama, who was allowed to enter the United States just days after his country’s Supreme Court opened an investigation into charges that he had helped embezzle $45 million from a government school lunch program.

      Ricardo Martinelli, a billionaire supermarket magnate, had been on the State Department’s radar since he was elected in 2009. That year, the U.S. ambassador to Panama began sending diplomatic cables warning about the president’s “dark side,” including his links to corruption and his request for U.S. support for wiretapping his opponents.

      Soon after Martinelli left office in 2014, Panamanian prosecutors conducted a widely publicized investigation of corruption in the school lunch program, and in mid-January 2015, forwarded their findings to the country’s Supreme Court.

      On Jan. 28, 2015, just hours before the Supreme Court announced a formal probe into the charges, Martinelli boarded a private plane, flew to Guatemala City for a meeting and then entered the United States on a visitor visa. Within weeks, he was living comfortably in the Atlantis, a luxury condominium on Miami’s swanky Brickell Avenue. He is still here.

      [...]

      https://www.propublica.org/art... [propublica.org]

  • I know a Nigerian prince who can convert your bitcoin. Or, if you want real estate, I can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.
  • I mean why hastily putting money in some smallish countries' banks while you can just as well buy a lot of physical assets in the most population rich countries of the world?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      For one thing, crypto currency is illegal, or close to it, in both China and India..

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ffkom ( 3519199 )
        Why take a detour through crypto currency, while China and India are very much still trading with Russia in usual currencies?

  • I feel like some agreement amongst the anti invasion countries to treat any of these coins (if identified) as seizable indefinitely could destroy their value, and have a secondary effect of undercutting crypto in the future (if identified).

    I assume these transactions are being done by exchanging the wallet, not actual Bitcoin transactions, but if one piece can ever be tracked back to an oligarch's wallet they can taint any coins that came from it.

    If people start losing their Bitcoin 5 years from now because

  • why are crypto prices not falling? I call this clickbate reporting.

    • why are crypto prices not falling? I call this clickbate reporting.

      I can think of a few possible reasons.

      One might be they haven't actually tried liquidating it yet. I'm guessing that kind of sell is far from a routine transaction.

      Another is if the exchanges might be reluctant to carry out the request.

      For instance, do you have $2 billion in cash lying around?

      If there's not enough people willing to buy then the price will crash to whatever the floor on their sell order is. And if I'm an exchange I don't want to be responsible for crashing the price of bitcoin, nor do I want

    • A better question is why aren't crypto prices rising? Gold has gone up a good bit as you'd expect in times of financial instability but the purported final solution to fiat currency losing value has been slowly trending downwards the whole time. I suspect you're seeing dumping masked by acquisitions - speculators hoping for a sharp rise due to actual need, however the need was was a transfer of wealth from one currency to another and they are simply buying and selling and eating the small losses as just the
  • The Exact opposite of what you're supposed to do with crypto?

    • They're expecting that some form of internet regulation, or possibly foreign state hackers, will prevent them from accessing their crypto wallets or plainly steal it from them.

      Good old fashioned tax havens have helped the rich stash their money away during old times, it's only natural that they go back to that in the verge of increased risk around crypto...

    • Seems like making all transactions public in a permanent distributed ledger is the exact opposite of hiding assets...

  • If there are enough Russians who've squirreled away their cash in things like bitcoin and suddenly a lot of them try to cash out, the value of bitcoin might crash, and make them want to cash out even further.
  • If I have Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency on an exchange I can easily just move it to a wallet of my own. You don't need to keep crypto currency on a centralized exchange. In fact the original idea behind cryptocurrencies was to not need centralized financial institutions. Second if people really were selling Bitcoin in the billions the price would have fallen. It is currently up 2.2% on the week. If the Russians were worried that their crypto was being tracked on the very public ledgers they would
  • Or in Gold we trust. The trouble with bitcoin, is transactions are trackable. If not to an individual, then to the exchange. The exchange can then come under heat, or ordered to assist and dob in the bank side of things. Then the bank, or country is bullied into sanctions, or tracked to real assets or holding companies - then assets/ playtoys seized. There were plenty of fools buying into Tulips, once. Looks like the smart money is moving. One is shocked that tax authorities don't see this as a problem.
    • who says tax isnt paid? in my country crypto is taxed, we declare and pay it end of financial year. Needing to pay tax in more countries doesnt kill crypto. it actually helps legitamise it.

  • so much for the assertion that the rich in Russia know nothing of what's going on in the outside world, in service of an implication that they're not responsible for what Putin's doing. The rich in Russia clearly know that there are huge sanctions against Russia and that much of the outside world is operating in extreme outrage, to the extent that many countries are now seizing assets of rich Russians. Nobody in that position is going to talk to outside financial operators and get advice on how and where to

  • People have $ 2Bn in BTC ??
    So it yo-yos from $ 1Bn to $ 4 Bn every few weeks ? Balls of steel I say.

    Unless it was all earned with crypto biz I guess. Even then...

    Or maybe it's all proceeds of real shitty crime so there's no place else to keep it

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