Over the past year and a half, at least €1.2 million worth of sanctioned technology has been shipped to Russia via a Dutch company owned by a Russian businessman. He appears from research by News hour For illicit trade and circumvention of sanctions from the European Union to Russia.
In cooperation with the German ARD Nieuwsuur Last Thursday He has already highlighted another company in Germany that sent large shipments of electronics for the defense industry to Russia. German police raided the company just before the broadcast.
In the Dutch case, which Newssur paid attention to on Saturday, it concerns the company ETW-Tekhnologika BV from Voorschoten, owned by Russian businessman Mikhail Volovik. The company was successively managed by Dutch directors. They both stated to Nieuwsuur that they were not aware of the violations and have since resigned. The Russian owner could not be reached for comment.
According to the investigation, Volovik’s company ETW buys technological items in the West and then sells them to Russia via Latvia as “medical” goods, which are exempt from sanctions. According to former ETW director Frick Snell, he initially had no reason to doubt the legality of the action. “As long as these goods go directly to Russia and the payments come directly from Russia, it can be reasonably controlled,” Snell says. According to him, the invoices were in order and customs allowed the goods to pass.
Exception in penal legislation
But in the period following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the imposition of Western sanctions, Snell suddenly saw the final destination of the goods change. Russia was no longer a final destination for the goods, but rather moved through Russia to destinations in Kazakhstan, the Emirates and Hong Kong, where new customers suddenly appeared. Payments to ETW also no longer come from Russia, but are routed through companies elsewhere. The company cleverly exploited the exception in the sanctions legislation, which stipulates allowing goods to transit through Russia to third countries. However, Russian customs data seen by Newsur shows that dozens of goods were cleared in Moscow and remained in Russia.
The medical destination of the goods is also questionable. Customs data shows that ETW shipped items such as magnets and cooling devices, but it also shipped plugs and sockets that can be used to connect printed circuit boards to processors. Newsor said in the report that the Russian defense industry “is in dire need of such things to launch missiles at Ukraine.” In addition, Volovik’s wife owns a company in Russia that counts sanctioned Russian state-owned companies such as Gazprom, Rosneft, and Russian defense company Remdiesel, among its clients, according to the website.
“useful idiot”
Shortly after the start of the war and sanctions, Director Snell saw the number of transactions increasing rapidly. When he heard from “someone in [Nederlandse] The government received a report that the case was not valid, so he resigned. He now calls himself in an interview “naive” and “a useful idiot.”
There is no trace of the Russian owner, who is said to live in Israel and, like many wealthy Russians, has a passport from the Caribbean archipelago of St. Kitts and Nevis. In an industrial park in Latvia, where ETW sends goods to Russia, journalists are also frustrated. The broadcast shows that there are strong indications that internationally operating businessmen like Volovik often have connections with Russian intelligence services, which closely monitor illicit trade in equipment useful to the Russian defense industry.
The research once again shows how innovative Russian or related companies are in circumventing Western sanctions. Since the war in Ukraine, countless trade routes have been changed, businesses have been transformed and new ones have been created as “cover”. It appears that Western companies that say they have left the Russian market are still active there, or are active again in some cases. It appears to be relatively easy to do this via third countries such as Kazakhstan, Turkey, Armenia and China Dual use Products to Russia: Medical or household items, parts of which can be used such as chips in the defense industry.
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This report is about sanctions circumvention in Kazakhstan
investigation earlier this year Norwegian Refugee Council ‘Gray trade’ through Kazakhstan Then an anonymous businessman in the Kazakh city of Almaty told how his country was flooded with Russian businessmen after the first sanctions against Russia were imposed.
After Russia was cut off from the international payment system SWIFT, Kazakhstan frantically opened corporate and bank accounts and bought expensive apartments, sending housing prices soaring. In the months following the invasion, exports of washing machines, semiconductors, refrigerators and other appliances from Europe to Russia’s neighbors rose dramatically.
Goat tracks
Despite warnings from the European Union and the United States to third countries about so-called secondary sanctions, and promises by those countries to respect the sanctions from now on, trade with Russia appears to be continuing in many cases through all kinds of back-and-forth exchanges. . This is partly possible because a country like Kazakhstan wants to maintain friendly relations between Moscow and the West, and strict censorship is technically impossible.
Interestingly, in the case of the ETW from Voorschoten, the route was reversed: it did not pass through a third country to Russia, but went to Russia under the guise of “transiting” elsewhere.
A Dutch customs spokesman admitted in the Nieuwsuur broadcast that detecting sanctions violations is an almost impossible task for the Netherlands and other European countries. “We cannot verify whether the goods were actually sent or remained ‘accidentally’ in Russia,” the spokesperson says. However, it is worth noting that Dutch Customs says it does not use Russian trade figures and import data, and that European data is sufficient.
The other problem is that the European Union issues sanctions, but has not concluded any agreements on additional manpower to monitor compliance with the sanctions. The Baltics in particular lack money, knowledge and people, a Lithuanian customs employee told Nieuwsuur in Thursday’s episode. “The EU imposed sanctions without predicting how they would be implemented,” says the customs official.
ETW is not the only Russian-controlled Dutch company circumventing sanctions. Last year, a Dutch judge sentenced Russian businessman Dmitry K. Imprisonment for 18 months in a similar penalty case. Although the judge assessed the flight risk as low and released K, the man immediately left for Moscow after the ruling.
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