Cali cartel
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 Cali cartel  (Drug cartel)   | |
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Saint Petersburg Immobilien und Beteiligungs AG, SPAG, a real estate company registered in Germany in 1992 is reported to have been investigated by German police on suspicion of facilitating Saint Petersburg mobsters, Colombian drug lords, and transcontinental money laundering. A co-founder of the company, Rudolf Ritter, was arrested in Liechtenstein for laundering cocaine cash for the Cali cartel.[1]
Former Ukrainian presidential bodyguard Nikolai Melnichenko bugged the following conversation between Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma and his security chief Leonid Derkach about SPAG:[1][2]
- Leonid Derkach: Leonid Danilovich. We've got some interesting material here from the Germans. One of them has been arrested.
- Leonid Kuchma (reading aloud): Ritter, Rudolf Ritter.
- Leonid Derkach: Yes, and about that affair, the drug smuggling. Here are the documents. They gave them all out. Here's Vova Putin, too.
- Leonid Kuchma: There's something about Putin there?
- Leonid Derkach: The Russians have already been buying everything up. Here are all the documents. We're the only ones that still have them now. I think that [[[FSB chief]]] Nikolai Patrushev is coming from the 15th to the 17th. This will give him something to work with. This is what we'll keep. They want to shove the whole affair under the carpet.
Later in the conversation Derkach states that "they've bought up all these documents throughout Europe and only the rest are in our hands".[2]
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References
- ↑ a b New Book Poses Question of Putin's Links with Underworld. The St. Petersburg Times
- ↑ a b J.V. Koshiw (12–13 October 2007). "Kuchma's "Parallel Cabinet" - The center of President Kuchma's authoritarian rule based on the Melnychenko recordings" (PDF).Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto").
