Russia follows China in illicit capital outflow

Global Financial Integrity evaluated illicit outflow of capital from Russia during 2000-2008 at $427 billion. The Russian Federation took the second position on the list with such a number, while the dishonorable first place was taken by China with $2.18 trillion. The top five also includes Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.

All of those countries, except China, are oil and gas exporters - the countries, whose economies primarily depend on the export of hydrocarbons. Thus, there is no country in the world that fully uses raw materials revenues for their own development because of either corruption or a hidden form of colonial management.

The top ten of the list includes the leaders of oil and gas export: Mexico ($416 billion), Saudi Arabia ($302 billion), Malaysia ($291 billion), United Arab Emirates ($276 billion), Kuwait ($242 billion), Venezuela and Bolivia ($157 billion), Qatar ($138 billion) and Nigeria ($130 billion).

The list continues with Kazakhstan ($126 billion), the Philippines ($109 billion), Poland ($106 billion), Indonesia and India ($104 billion each), Argentina ($90 billion), Ukraine ($82 billion), Turkey ($77 billion), Chile ($70 billion) and the Czech Republic ($66 billion).

According to the organization, the illicit outflow of capital from Russia made up $15.61 billion in 2000, $37,04 billion - in 2004 and $55,33 billion - in 2007. During the hardest phase of the crisis, the outflow skyrocketed to $196.4 billion.

One of the most popular ways used in illegal capital outflow scheme include non-repayment of export earnings, overpriced imports and underpriced exports.

According to the Central Bank of the Russian Federation, the net outflow of private capital from Russia made up $38.3 billion as of 2010. The capital outflow as of the fourth quarter of 2010 was registered on the level of $22.7 billion, which was considerably higher than what original forecasts said.

In general, from 2000 to 2008, the illicit outflow of capital from developing countries increased from $369 billion to $1.26 trillion. GFI has only preliminary results for 2009.

Experts say that one should treat the statistics carefully, because it is extremely hard to evaluate the illegal outflow of capital correctly.
Nevertheless, a correlation between the total amount of private investments in offshores and the growth of the world GDP gives an opportunity to presume the existence of enormous shadow capital flows. GFI experts say that the total amount of private investments in special banking jurisdictions has been gaining nine percent a year steadily since the beginning of the 1990s. The average growth of the world GDP during those years made up only 3.9 percent.

The most attractive jurisdictions for private investors are the USA, the UK and Cayman Islands.

The total amount of private investments in those jurisdictions reaches $10 trillion, with $2.18 trillion of the amount falling on the US-controlled territories, $1.55 trillion - on Cayman Islands and $1.53 trillion - on the UK.

Sergei Nikolayev
Pravda.Ru

Read the original in Russian