Buying cocaine on a Friday night in Britain can indirectly help Russian arms factories, the National Crime Agency (NCA) has warned.
The NCA said a man linked to a Russian-led money-laundering network operating in the UK had bought a bank in Kyrgyzstan which was used to make payments on behalf of the Russian war machine.
Sal Melki, the agency’s Deputy Director for Economic Crime, said it was a “vast criminal ecosystem that is funding some really bad things all around the world”.
The NCA is trying to disrupt the network from top to bottom, even putting adverts in UK motorway service station toilets to warn couriers carrying cash for the money-launderers of the lengthy jail sentences they face
Rossi bought the bank through his company Altair Holding SA. On Christmas Day 2024, Altair Holding SA took a 75% stake in Keremet Bank.
Further work showed that Keremet Bank was facilitating payments for a Russian state-owned bank called Promsvyazbank (PSB) which is described by the US treasury as a “sanctions evasion hub”.
The NCA says Keremet Bank was helping PSB make payments for “Russia’s military-industrial base”, in other words, for the arms factories making weapons for the Ukraine war.
At street level TGR and Smart provide a “full spectrum of money-laundering services”, the NCA said.
They allow people like drug dealers and suppliers of illegal firearms to swap their cash for cryptocurrency.
Investigators say the money-laundering network was operating in at least 28 towns and cities across the UK “sustaining an entire architecture that allows crime to pay in our country”.
The NCA’s Sal Melki said: “We can’t ignore the sheer scale of this threat.”
He said: “We can draw a thread between somebody buying cocaine on a Friday night in the UK, all the way through to geopolitical events that are causing suffering across the world.
“It’s not as simple as ‘OK, I pay my drug dealer and that is the end of it’. This is actually a vast criminal ecosystem, that is funding some really bad things all around the world.
“We can say with certainty that laundering street cash is really critical to underpinning how serious crime works in our country.”
