Viktor Zubkov said all the holders of the frozen accounts had appeared on a UN Security Council list of money launderers and financiers of terrorist activities.
He said the problems of money laundering and terrorist financing threatened Russia as well as the rest of Europe, with monetary funds becoming increasingly easy to transfer from one country to another, thereby making the scale of money laundering in any one country difficult to determine. He also said Russia was combating money laundering in cooperation with other European nations, including Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium.
Zubkov reported that his agency had conducted some 3,800 inquiries into alleged fiscal offenses in the first nine months of the year. He said more than 2,000 cases had been subsequently referred to law-enforcement agencies for further investigation, as compared with last year's 1,100.
