Cryptocurrencies: a new trick to promote money laundering in the UAE
Reuters global news agency revealed details on a new trick used in the UAE to promote money laundering using digital currencies.
The agency quoted officials and financial sources saying that digital currency companies in the UAE are receiving a flood of requests to monetize cryptocurrencies worth billions of dollars as part of the Russians’ search for a haven for their wealth.
The sources stated that some customers use digital currencies to invest in real estate in the UAE, while others want to convert their virtual wealth into hard currency and hide it.
An executive said that a crypto-currency company had received many inquiries from Swiss brokers in the past 10 days to monetize billions of dollars worth of bitcoin because their clients feared that Switzerland would freeze their assets, adding that each of these requests was at least $2 billion.
“We’ve had about five or six in the last two weeks,” he said. None of them has been implemented yet, as it seems that they came in the last moments, which is not uncommon. But we’ve never seen this much interest,” he said, adding that his firm usually receives one inquiry per month for a big deal.
He continued: “We have a client, I don’t know who he is, but he came through a middleman and said something like ‘We want to sell 125,000 bitcoin’. My response was, ‘How much? You guys are talking about six billion dollars. Their response was, ‘Yes, we will send it to a company in Australia.’
Switzerland’s Financial Markets Supervisory Authority declined to comment on cryptocurrency transaction volumes.
The country’s secretariat of economic affairs said in an emailed statement that crypto-assets are subject to the sanctions and measures imposed by Switzerland on ordinary Russian assets and Russian individuals and that if a person is subject to sanctions, their crypto assets will also be frozen in Switzerland.
Dubai, the financial and business centre in the Gulf region and one of the emerging centres of digital currencies, has long attracted the world’s richest people, and the UAE’s refusal to take sides at the expense of the other Western allies and Moscow instructed the Russians that their money is safe in it.
“We have seen many people from Russia and even Belarus come to Dubai and bring with them everything they can bring, even digital currencies,” said a real estate broker whose company has partnered with a crypto services unit to help those wishing to buy property.
