Russian money flows through U.S. real estate

As President Joe Biden vows to punish Russia with financial sanctions by seizing yachts, mansions and other assets, members of the real estate community and lawmakers are skeptical about how successful he’ll be at getting access to the money Russians have been pouring into real estate for decades.

From Sunny Isles, Florida, to Cleveland and high rises in Manhattan, post-Soviet oligarchs’ money has poured into big cities and the heartland in recent decades with little recourse.

That’s because there is very little the government can do to find out who owns what real estate in the U.S., which has become a “destination of choice” for money launderers throughout the world, said Louise Shelley, the director of the transnational crime and corruption center at George Mason University, who has been an expert witness about how Russian money is laundered through real estate.

At a minimum, from cases reported in the last five years, more than $2.3 billion has been laundered through U.S. real estate, including millions more through other alternative assets, like art, jewelry and yachts, according to a report in August by Global Financial Integrity, a nonprofit group that researches illicit money flows.

In 2020, Congress passed legislation to empower the Treasury Department to stop tax evaders, kleptocrats, terrorists and other criminals from using anonymous shell companies to hide and launder assets, including those in real estate. It requires companies to self-report to the Treasury Department certain basic information, including the assets’ true owners. The information will be in a database for law enforcement, national security officials and financial institutions.

“There’s not enough teeth into regulations in terms of making Realtors report,” Shelley said. “And there’s not been enough emphasis on commercial real estate. It’s all about oligarchs’ buying real estate for themselves.”

While European countries have long had similar requirements, the latest legislation is a departure from the U.S.’s long-standing approach to private companies and disclosure requirements. Still, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is working on the final regulations necessary to activate the network. But it addresses only part of a much bigger problem. Experts say oligarchs can benefit from major disclosure loopholes in private equity and luxury goods.

“There’s this misunderstanding that you can just go out and seize these mansions, seize these yachts. For so many of them, it’s a complete black box,” said Casey Michel, the author of “American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History.”

“The U.S. provided all the tools of anonymity the oligarchs needed,” he said, and there’s no immediate executive action Biden can take to fix it.

Decades of investing

Russian money has been pouring into the U.S. since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In 1999, Richard Palmer, who was the CIA’s Moscow embassy station chief, warned in congressional testimony that Russian kleptocrats and KGB officials had poured billions of dollars into private accounts across Europe and the U.S. in the dying days of the Soviet Union.

Michel said that after the passage in 2001 of the Patriot Act, which required disclosure of major banking transactions, much of the money was shifted into real estate property and luxury goods hidden through shell companies.

It has been a challenge for governments and academics trying to measure the scope of the wealth. By 2015, Gabriel Zucman, the director of the Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at the University of California, Berkeley, estimated that 52 percent of Russia’s wealth was held outside the country. The Treasury Department maintains a “report on oligarchs and parastatal entities of the Russian federation.” While the list of 96 oligarchs is public, there is also a much longer classified version that includes a deep dive into the finances of the oligarchs and entities, including their sources of income and exposure to the U.S. economy.

New York-bound

During the real estate boom in 2006 and 2007, Russians flocked to Manhattan to buy up properties. They bought up floors at the Plaza Hotel and logged record sales at the Time Warner Center and 15 Central Park West. They also eventually attracted the attention of law enforcement. In New York. Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin whose name has been repeatedly raised in investigations involving Russia and former President Donald Trump, was linked to a home in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, even though he had not come to the U.S. in years, The Washington Post reported. (He was also connected to a home in Washington, D.C., through a Delaware-incorporated company. The FBI raided both properties in October.) Calls to Deripaska’s former lobbying firm, which ended its contract with him last week, were not returned. On Telegram, Deripaska denounced the war, saying: “The world is very important! Negotiations need to start as soon as possible.”