The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) does tremendous work exposing corruption, illicit financial activity, and other crime around the globe. OCCRP is a consortium of investigative reporters who fearlessly uncover some of the world’s most unscrupulous and nefarious actors and regimes. The organization was involved in exposing the Magnitsky case in Russia—the largest tax fraud in Russian history that resulted in Magnitsky and Global Magnitsky authorities in the United States and worldwide to punish corrupt actors—worked with the International Consortium of Independent Journalists on the Panama Papers; and worked to expose the Russian Laundromat that moved tens of billions in misappropriated assets out of Russia into Europe using offshore companies, fake loans, banks in Moldova and Latvia, and corrupt Moldovan judges.
In other words, OCCRP is a gold standard in anti-corruption work!
So when the organization names its most corrupt actor of the year—"the individual or institution that has done the most to advance organized criminal activity and corruption in the world"—that dubious honor should be taken seriously.
I had a feeling that this year would be the year Belarussian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko would run away with the “award.” I was not surprised. After all, he stole the election last year, harassed his opponent Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, threatened her family, and finally—after she filed a formal complaint with the Central Election Commission on election night and was detained for seven hours in retaliation—ran her out of the country and to Lithuania.
But Lukashenko wasn’t done yet. His security forces harassed, abused, and imprisoned protesters who opposed his election fraud.
This year, his regime hijacked a RyanAir aircraft, forced it down under the guise of a bomb threat, arrested a young opposition blogger, Roman Protasevich, and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, tortured him into admitting that he organized anti-government protests and into praising Lukashenko, and included him on a list of individuals involved in terrorist activity.
The regime recently charged Sapega with “inciting hatred.”
Lukashenko’s human rights abuses are just the tip of the iceberg. In some of the most callous, morally repugnant actions the world has seen, the dictator decided to use vulnerable, frightened migrants as human shields in his hybrid war games. In May, Lukashenko promised to flood the EU with drugs and migrants if the EU imposed sanctions on him in the aftermath of the RyanAir hijacking.
And that is exactly what he did.
Promising these desperate people passage to the EU—what they must have viewed as the promised land—and helping them trespass across the borders, Lukashenko and his thugs then tried to blame Poland, Lithuania, and other EU countries for “cruelty” toward the migrants, whom he and his regime shuttled to the border and left in the cold.
The government of Belarus loosened its visa rules in August, Iraqi travel agents said, making a flight to the country a more palatable journey to Europe than the dangerous sea crossing from Turkey to Greece.
It increased flights by the state-owned airline, and then actively helped funnel migrants from the capital, Minsk, to the frontiers with Poland, Latvia and Lithuania.
And Belarusian security forces gave them directions on how to cross into the European Union countries, even handing out wire cutters and axes to cut through border fences.
What kind of garbage human exploits the desperation of people who are willing to leave everything behind and travel thousands of miles to what they hope is a better life, dropped off by Belarussian security services in the middle of nowhere in the freezing cold, callously using them as human ammunition just to get even with his neighbors for condemning his state-sponsored hijacking of a commercial aircraft?
Is it any wonder this soulless dictator is shunned by anyone with a conscience?
But Lukashenko is involved in regular, garden-variety corruption as well.
Transparency International says that despite Belarus having improved by a whole two points on its 2020 Corruption Perceptions Index from the previous year, Lukashenko may have merely consolidated graft, fraud, and abuse in his paws and those of his closest bootlickers. Although Lukashenko was elected in the 1990s on an anti-corruption platform, he succeeded in synthesizing corruption at the top.
Last year, a media investigation showed that Lukashenko’s family is linked to at least two sketchy companies in Cyprus, which is where a lot of corrupt eastern Europeans—and particularly Russians—stow away their assets and obscure their ownership. The two Cypriot real-estate companies—Eastleigh Trading and Dana Holdings—both have links to the president's daughter-in-law, Lilya Lukashenko, the wife of his oldest son, Viktor, who was named director of Eastleigh Trading by former Belarussian anti-corruption head, Vyacheslav Dudkin, who wound up fleeing the country.
Dudkin said Lilya Lukashenko and Eastleigh Trading owner, Belarusian tycoon Vladimir Peftiev, had used the firm in fraudulent schemes.
And Peftiev was blacklisted in previous EU sanctions in 2011, on grounds he had been a "key financial sponsor of the Lukashenko regime", a decision later annulled by the EU court.
Lilya Lukashenko currently runs an art gallery in a Dana Holdings group shopping mall in Minsk.
Apparently the only kind of “art” Lilya is involved in is tossing lucrative business to her daddy-in-law’s pet commercial enterprises.
She was also listed as a “Замдиректор”—deputy director—for Minsk-based Dana Holdings subsidiary, Dana Astra, according to 2017 Belarusian financial records. Dana Holdings—coincidentally, I’m sure—got lucrative contracts to build numerous luxury apartment buildings in Minsk in recent years, and the company was one of the firms that voiced proud support for Lukashenko while other firms stood in solidarity with the protesters.
And then there was the movie. “Lukashenko. Goldmine” alleges that the dictator lives a charmed life, spending hundreds of millions of dollars in misappropriated assets on luxury real estate, planes, and expensive cars. Lukashenko claimed that the cars were gifts from various businessmen.
That doesn’t raise red flags. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Lukashenko is more than deserving of the title as the most corrupt person of the year. He joins such illustrious individuals as Brazil’s Jair “no more corruption in the government” Bolsonaro; Lukashenko’s buddy Vladimir Putin; Danske Bank for allowing hundreds of billions (yes, with a “b”) of dollars to be laundered through its Estonian branch; and Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.
Well deserved.
Lukashenko is already on OFAC’s SDN list, prohibiting US persons and entities from transacting with him and any entity he owns, and he is sanctioned by the EU. But as long as he has Putin supporting him and tossing money in his direction, he will not care and will continue his abuses.