 Thank you very much. Earlier this morning, you get – both you get, and Jean spoke about the need for good governance in attacking this problem, and nowhere is that more a factor than in Russia, which is the focus of our next panel. Other than China, Russia has the largest outflows of illicit money in our annual survey, $2 trillion since 1994. Many of our other country-specific studies go back much further. I think India was 1948. Data from Russia is only since 94, and it's $2 trillion. So quite significant. People are very aware of the problems there, oligarchies and so on and so forth. So I think we're going to get some very specific information from our next panel, Dr. Anders Ashland, Peter Harrell, and our moderator, Clark Gascoigne. Thanks. Thank you, Tom. I also just wanted to quickly note that we have a new edition. There was a new program printed today. Evgeny Shumilov is going to be joining us from the Russian embassy. So as Tom mentioned, my name's Clark Gascoigne. I am the Deputy Director of the FACT Coalition that stands for Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency. FACT is a coalition uniting roughly 100 plus small business, labor, faith-based, human rights, anti-corruption, public interest, international development organizations, you name it. Mostly here in the US focused on curtailing the abuses of offshore tax havens and the revenue drain associated with that on the US government. Also curtailing the illicit flow of money through the US financial system and a big component of that. And where we put a lot of our effort in the coalition is on the abuse of anonymous companies and ensuring that beneficial ownership transparency when you incorporate a business here in the United States that you're declaring who the true human person is that owns that company as that gets to the heart of one of the biggest tools for laundering money around the world. As we've heard a lot so far about the pernicious global effect of illicit financial flows, the effect that this has on developing countries, the least developed countries, on countries like India, but this is really truly a global phenomenon. It has a huge impact on the United States, which is where our coalition comes in and we're trying to curtail those abuses at FACT, but also on countries like Russia, which is the subject of our current panel. Russia has had cumulative illicit outflows of 1.34 trillion dollars since it started reporting data to the IMF in 1994 and illicit inflows of 1.93 trillion dollars for cumulative illicit flows totaling 3.27 trillion. This is a startling amount of money to be flowing in and out of the country and amounts to an equivalent of roughly 20% of Russia's GDP. So with that, I'm going to get to introducing our panel and our first speaker in particular is going to be Anders Ostlund, who is a resident senior fellow in the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council. He is a leading specialist on East European economies, especially Russia and Ukraine, and also teaches at Georgetown University. He has served as an economic advisor to several governments, notably to the Russian government from 1991 to 1994 and to the Ukrainian government from 1994 to 1997. Dr. Ostlund served as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Geneva, Poland, Moscow and Stockholm From 89 to 94, he was professor and founding director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economies at the Stockholm School of Economics. He has also been a scholar at the Kenan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and with the Brookings Institution. From 1994 to 2005, he worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as a senior associate and director of the Russian and Eurasian program. In parallel, he was co-directing the program on post-Soviet economies at the Carnegie Moscow Center. He was a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. I think that about sums up every single think tank in Washington from 2006 to 2015. Dr. Ostlund received his doctorate from Oxford University in 1982. He has a BA from the University of Stockholm and an MSc in economics from the Stockholm School of Economics. Dr. Ostlund has authored 13 books and edited 16 books and has been published widely. Our second panelist today is going to be Evgeny Shumlov, who I have his bio on my phone, so just bear with me for a second. He is an economic officer at the Embassy of Russia, where he specializes in the U.S. economy and oil and gas issues. He has been with the embassy in the U.S. since 2012. He received his master's degree in economics at the Moscow State Institute for International Relations and a master's degree in business at the Gubkin Russian State Oil and Gas University. Our third panelist today is Peter Harrell. Peter Harrell is the founder and principal of Prospect Global Strategies LLC, a boutique consulting firm that advises U.S. and international companies on economic sanctions, political risk, and international policy matters. Prior to founding Prospect Global Strategies, Mr. Harrell served from 2012 to 2014 as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Counter-Threat Finance and Sanctions in the U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. In that role, Mr. Harrell was instrumental in developing U.S. sanctions, developing U.S. economic sanctions policy, including U.S. and international sanctions against Iran, Russia, and Syria, and in easing sanctions against Myanmar and Cuba. He played a leading role in the U.S. government's efforts to counter terrorist financing and served as co-chair of the U.S. government working group on combating the financing of the Islamic State. Mr. Harrell also had broad responsibility for fighting the global trade and conflict minerals, including implementation of the Dodd-Frank Conflict Minerals Provisions, the Kimberley Process Rough Diamond Certification Agreement, and global supply chain integrity. From 2009 to 2012, Mr. Harrell served on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's policy planning staff, where he co-led the development of Secretary Clinton's economic statecraft agenda, which brought a renewed focus to the role of international economics in American diplomacy. He also worked on a variety of other economic issues, including trade and investment policy and international legal issues. In addition to leading prospect global strategies, Mr. Harrell serves as an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where he writes on the intersection of economics and national security. Harrell is a frequent public commentator and has been published or quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, MSNBC, and various media outlets. He's also a frequent speaker and panelist at industry conferences, including giving presentations at the British Bankers Association, and so forth. Mr. Harrell is a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton and holds a JD from the Yale Law School. He's originally from Atlanta. So welcome to our panelists. We'll start off with Anders to get everyone started. Anders? Thank you very much for a long and kind presentation. I wanted to focus on a few major things about this report. First of all, I think that this is a good report. I should say what really comes out from the report, which is not stated, but you can see it from the statistics. It is that Russia is quite a wealthy country, but it does not have a rule of law. So therefore you would expect large outflows and large inflows, and that's exactly what you're seeing. The Russian Bank is located abroad because money is not safe in a Russian bank because the Russian state cannot guarantee the rule of law. That's the essence that I see coming out of this report. And if we look upon it here, I think the amounts make sense. They are very large, and that's the general impression. They are twice as large as from other BRICS economists, and part of it was Russia's much richer, and it has less rule of law than the others. And it's very good that both inflows and outflows are emphasized. And it also discusses that to begin with, the problem was macroeconomic instability, high inflation, and untrustworthy exchange rates, and then repeated bank collapses, which are not discussed. And today the problem is the rule of law, so that you keep free cash abroad. Something that is essential for this story is the rule of Cyprus, not only for Russia but for the rest of the former Soviet Union. Because at the end of the Soviet Union, a double taxation agreement was completed between the Soviet Union and Cyprus, and that remains in force. This double taxation agreement means that you don't pay tax on transactions when you go through Cyprus. So virtually all transactions for a long time went through Cyprus from Russia, the same for Ukraine. And if you look upon the big crash in Cyprus two years ago, the strange thing about Cyprus was that there was so much cash in the banks. And that comes from Russia and Ukraine. And you wonder why didn't people move the cash? Well, much of this cash was held by state officials who did not know how to move the cash because they were not sufficiently sophisticated. I heard that in Ukraine the group that were particularly hit were the poor state prosecutors who kept all the bribes that they had gathered in simple bank accounts in Cyprus because they did not know how to invest the money. The more serious money, of course, moves on. So we then come to the question who are these people who take out all this money? And I would suggest three categories, three very different categories to you. And one category is obvious. You mentioned already the oligarchs. You have or had $100 billionaires in Russia. And they have moved out the money to a considerable extent that also explains that when the oil price goes up, the capital outflows increase as the report points out simply because you have more free cash. So where do you keep it? You keep it in the bank and the bank is abroad. So this is quite un-dramatic and quite natural. The second group is the state officials and the cronies. This is the serious and interesting group. And these people are making lots of money being top state officials. A few years ago there was a joke in Russia. Advice to a young Russian woman. When you get married, it's better to marry a top state official than an oligarch because the money is the same and the tenure is so much safer for a state official. So this captures the situation in Russia today that the top state officials are making immense money and are widely considered to be billionaires while it's only sometimes reflected in the Forbes list. And this is, of course, money laundering when the money goes outside of Russia. And I think that this is something that in your context here should be considered quite seriously. That top state officials and cronies, many of these are now on the US sanction list but they could have been prosecuted for money laundering before. And when I ask people connected with the Department of Justice why they don't go after these people, they say, sorry, we don't have resources for this. These investigations are very costly and we have a very small budget for international investigations. It's really just by chance when we manage to go after somebody like Dmitry Firtas in Ukraine. And then we have a third group, smaller, medium-sized businessmen. The people who are not moving to London but are moving to the Baltic states because they don't have more money but they want to live safe and you don't live very safe as a former businessman in Russia. So they want to get out of the country and this gives us three very different groups. The first they manage on their own, we don't really care about them. The second are quite a serious issue, not least since many of them come from the security services. And the third is people who should be taken care of. So then finally, what does Putin's deoptorization mean? Well, one of my Russian friends said Putin's deoptorization means that Timchenko has moved back to Moscow, that is Putin's wealth is crony. He moved from Geneva, he's a Finnish citizen, and he has moved to Moscow now. So the kleptocrats haven't been nationalized, they have moved back. You can see that the top national security officials, they have by and large the children in top position in the state corporations. But at the same time, it's driving honest businessmen away from Russia. And this is of course a question, what should be done about Cyprus and the money flows. You don't really want to stop it, you want to clean up the dirty part of it and to hope for a role of law in Russia in the foreseeable future, seems rather utopian. Thank you. Alright, thanks Anders. We'll turn it over now to Jenny. Yep, you're welcome to speak from the theater up here. Well, thank you everyone for being here today. I'm really delighted to deliver remarks on the Russian perspective. I'm not that experienced as my colleagues here on the panel, but well, I try to be also precise to what is the topic of today, illicit financial flows. Well, we strongly believe that an effective fight against such criminal threats and challenges as terrorism financing, as drug trafficking and illegal weapons trafficking and money laundering cannot be limited solely to the military and law enforcement measures. It should be based on the multilateral cooperation under the aegis of the United Nations and the Security Council. And by the way, it was Russia's initiative to include such kind of a dangerous nexus in a paragraph of the Fundamental Council Terrorism Resolution adopted in 2001 by the Security Council 1373, I suppose, that calls on all countries to enhance their joint efforts and their cooperation in fighting such crimes and contribute to the global stability. That is the policy we pursue. And the core element of that is the Federal Service of Finance Monitoring. It's the Russian Financial Intelligence Unit that investigates on an annual basis well, thousands of such crimes as like money laundering, drug trafficking and so on. And given the global nature of such problems, we're really glad that we have over 80 bilateral agreements with various countries, including the United States. And despite the current political situations, such consultations, even in that sphere, are of particular importance for both countries and those consultations are still going on and that is a really positive and good signal. Just a couple of results regarding the 2014 efforts by our Financial Intelligence Unit. Russian authorities received in 2014 alone 11 million reports on suspicious activity. That is the main instrument of trying to end those criminal activities from financial institutions. And their volume is estimated to be at $2.6 trillion, so pretty insane, I would say. And that number also demonstrates the growth of more than 50% compared to 2013. Careful attention is also paid to international transboundary transactions since they're considered to be of somehow the riskiest. In this regard, I can say that the number of international reports on that suspicious activity grew 80% compared to 2013 and their volume to $200 billion. And despite the outstanding growth, the results, the number and volume of suspicious operations per se dropped 50% and to about $25 billion. These results were achieved, among others, thanks to joint efforts by Russian Financial Intelligence Units as well as their international colleagues in central banks through various measures like account freezing, operation suspension and many others. Then comes drug trafficking. Well, the least a drug trafficking accounts for like half of all criminal transboundary transactions and 20% of all transactions criminal overall. But only just 1% of proceeds coming from drug trade and production is confiscated. That means that almost all drug money in the course of time is becoming part of the legal financial system. And one of the biggest chunks of that world narcotic pie belongs to Afghanistan, which is certainly considered to be a great threat and poses severe challenges not only for Russia but various countries in Europe, Central Asia and beyond. 70 million people are estimated to abuse drugs originated from Afghanistan. Those proceeds and transactions annual basis are estimated at $70 billion. And in order to better understand the links between those money that could be used to fuel terrorism and extremism in various regions of the world, while Russia last year during its presidency at the Financial Election Task Force initiated a typological research inviting with the participation of experts from the United States, China, India, Pakistan, well, World Bank, IMF and the results of that research were very welcomed by the international community experts and besides by the Security Council. And if I may, just a couple of words on terrorist financing as well, since Russia is directly exposed like any other country to a terrorist threat and gives priority to establishment of a reliable system combating that. In order to implement Russia's obligations and to ensure that terrorists do not receive that financing as supposed to from illegal illicit activity. A list of the organizations and individuals which are known to be involved in terrorist and extremist activity is updated on a regular basis. It's like system is similar to the one that has the Treasury Department here with those blacklists and on the Russian blacklists there are 470 foreign nationals 4400 Russian residents which are forbidden to do any business with. Russia believes that today's focus should be paid to combating modern techniques of terrorist financing like crowdfunding, like modern methods of communication networks and material support. And besides, I just wanted to briefly reiterate that the principal position of our government that collecting efforts in fighting terrorism, drug trafficking should be free of double standards and politicization as it is really counterproductive in that sphere and well the safety of countries and population should be wobbled and I'll be happy to answer your questions and welcome your comments. Thank you. Thanks, Afghani. So we'll save questions and answers till the end but we'll continue on to Peter. So feel free. Thank you very much. I'd like to thank GFI and Raymond Baker and Channing May and the whole team for inviting me to participate here today and appreciate the chance to offer a couple of remarks. Let me begin by saying like Anders I thought this was a really interesting report well researched, timely, brought home the scale of the illicit financial flows with Russia and a nice follow-up to a really comprehensive report that many of you may have seen that GFI did, it's two years ago now, focused on Russia in 2013 and really leaves a lot of food for thought. I want to pick up on just a couple of things that struck me about the report building on a couple of points Anders made. And first is the role of Cyprus. This came through really in the report two years ago, comes through here which is a little bit shorter on Russia as well. I mean Cyprus has played this incredibly important role for Russian, both illicit and illicit financial flows for 15, 20 years now. And I think one of the things that will be interesting to see the data in this report is obviously now about 18 months out of date doesn't really reflect the European Union or American sanctions that have come into place over the last 18 months. And I think one of the interesting things to see going forward will be the extent to which flows that had been going through Cyprus migrate elsewhere, somewhere outside of the European Union. I work with the financial community on a variety of financial crime compliance issues as part of what I do. And I would say that we're seeing, I haven't seen public statistical evidence on this yet, but I would say that financial institutions are seeing more Russian money show up, particularly to some extent in Hong Kong and then in Singapore, also a little bit in the Middle East, which really shouldn't be a surprise, particularly because, as Anders mentioned, one of the principal sources of illicit financial outflows from Russia have been Russian state officials and regime-linked cronies such as Mr. Timchenko, where now many of them subject to sanctions by the United States and a couple of them subject to sanctions by the European Union. So it shouldn't really be a surprise that we're beginning to see anecdotally change in the pattern of flows, but it'll be interesting to see when we begin to see that statistically and also where else we will see those flows wash up. The other interesting thing about Cyprus is the way in which so much of the money goes back into Russia. I mean, one of the things that we, and this is highlighted in the report that we see with Russia more so than with some of the other countries studied is the round-tripping of money, where it's coming out and rather than being, well, although some of it is clearly parked outside of Russia, because I think people in Russia would like to keep their money outside of Russia, they're also using these non-Russian vehicles, Russians are taking money moving outside of Russia, then using non-Russian banks and corporate vehicles to reinvest some of the money in Russia, which I think, like Anders, I think reflects the generally poor confidence in Russian banks. You don't really want your money in the Russian banks and also in the rule of law. And it'll be interesting to see as the economic situation in Russia continues to deteriorate and as sanctions come into kind of continue to remain enforced, and I think most of us who look at that issue think the sanctions on Russia are going to remain into force for some time until there is an improvement on the situation in eastern Ukraine. It'll be interesting to see if the kind of reinvestment in Russia also dries up. I mean, we've seen this massive outflow on the licent side, on the legal side. We've seen this significant increase in outflows over the last 18 months as legitimate Russian actors and as international businesses in Russia take money out of Russia because of the deteriorating financial economic conditions in Russia. It'll be interesting to see how that's tracked on the illicit side and then also as the opportunities for business in Russia likely continue to constrict with a combination of sanctions and low oil prices, whether this kind of reinvestment of illicit funds in Russia also flows. I think we'll just be interesting to see, very interesting report and also be interesting to see what the next 18 months bring in terms of the shifting patterns of these financial flows both out of and into Russia. Thank you to all of our panelists so far. So I want to continue on what you were talking about with the oil prices in particular. The report found a link between higher oil prices and higher illicit outflows with the precipitous drop in oil prices. Is that going to have a significant impact on these illicit flows? So, you know, let me start by saying a little bit of what we have seen on the licent side. So last year on the illicit side, you know, according to Russian central bank statistics and sort of IMF World Bank statistics, we saw total capital outflows. Again, this is sort of illicit official statistics, not analysis for 2014, of $150 billion, $154 billion. And that was a significant increase over what I think had been sort of under 100, just about 100 the year before in 2013, again on the illicit side. You know, it looks like from the published estimates I've seen this year, 2015, we're probably looking at slightly below that. I mean, I saw a projection of maybe $130 billion in, again, sort of official statistic capital outflows for 2015. So that's actually a smaller delta than I would have predicted looking at kind of oil price declines. You'd think looking at the data in here that if we're just looking at sort of the oil price decline impact, you'd see a greater drop-off 2015 versus 2014. But I think the countervailing thing is just as the economic decline in Russia continues, we're going to see folks working to ship as much capital out of the country as they possibly can because they see fewer opportunities in Russia. So I think we're probably going to see both illicit and illicit kind of continued high outflows this year. At some point that money will kind of dry up because there's less money coming into the Russian system. So we're now talking about kind of sort of built-up capital in Russia, I think, coming out of Russia rather than kind of current inflows coming out of Russia. At some point the built-up capital dries up, Putin needs more of it to kind of bail out his cronies and sort of make domestic purposes. So I think we'll see high outflows this year but then barring some change in the situation probably a fairly strong drop-off, you know, next another year from now or so. Yeah, let me take it, follow up on that. Say that you have three big impacts now on the capital flows. The first is sanctions, which as Peter mentioned means the leveraging. Russian companies cannot get long-term financing now, so they have to pay off. And this is particularly true of the state companies that have been sanctioned. They account for 40% or so of the total indebtedness or perhaps half. And the second impact is the oil price in another way. And it is that it means falling exchange rate. The exchange rate has fallen by about half in dollar terms in a year and people expect that it will continue to fall. Expectations might be wrong but therefore many of the big Russian business have paid off their debts voluntarily if they have possibilities because they don't want to take the big currency risk that they are not being exposed to. So previously we have higher oil price meant that you got more cash and kept it abroad. Now lower oil price means that you have less cash in the future and therefore you want to minimize the risk so you can survive. So therefore the oil price actually has the opposite effect in this situation than previously. Yeah, I just made several points. First of all regarding the capital outflow from the country. Well, that's true according to official statistics. That was last year, it's about that, more than close to $150 billion. But still the central banking officials also underlined that on purpose that about 40% of those volumes were the conversion by the Russian population and Russian banks of rubble currency that was dropping due to oil prices into dollars but still keeping those in Russian banks. So on the paper that looks like outflow but conversion into dollar but pretty significant part of that money still remains in the country. And the second will answering your question regarding the oil price and the illicit financial flows. Well to me this is rather clear and the report also indicated that oil prices and Russian economy that's not a secret is heavily dependent on oil exports and gas exports. So with oil prices going up, the economy is booming and the number of oil transactions and their volume, legal, illegal is increasing. That I think is rather clear and that's vice versa. Oil prices drops, the GDP growth that we experience now is about like minus 3.4%. It also reflects that the number of those transactions that business activity is called and that means that the number of those transactions is also lower. Now is the lower oil prices which is creating a bit of a strain on the finances of the government is this with such huge outflows of money and even the illicit inflows which can be dodging customs duties, taxes, tariffs, things like that that help fund the government. Is there going to be a renewed emphasis within the Russian government to actually try to get on top of this problem do you think? Well I think well as we certainly follow on a regular daily basis what is going on in the Russian economy as well in the US economy is that the thesis that the Russian economy is collapsed or is deteriorating I think that somehow overstated a little bit since if you recall last year when sanctions, first sanctions were imposed, lots of officials and experts here kept saying that well Russian economy is going to collapse in a year or so but well nothing like that has happened. Russia has the minimum state debt, it has nothing to worry about. We have huge reserves and all prices going up, going down that is the regular, well that's regular natural thing. Then that large debts that Mr. Dr. Aslan mentioned that Russian companies had for sure but you know well as I was following the Russian media last week there was somehow the period of corporate debt repayment and all Russian companies did that well. We don't see any bankruptcies. Gazprom, Rosneft who have no access to long term financing here in the western market they saw somehow turning to Asian, well Singapore, Hong Kong that were mentioned as well. So in this regard and the oil price by the way we should always bear in mind that Russian budget isn't rubles, not in dollars so the devaluation of rubles coupled somehow it offsets the effect of lowering oil prices. So in this regard well the situation is not that severe. Okay Dr. Aslan I'm going to open up the question. Let me put another picture. When it comes to the public finances it's right because we've exchange rate falling like this. The budget is counted in rubles so the budget deficit will become something like three and a half, four percent of GDP rather than being close to balance. That's not a problem. The public debt is very small. It's about one tenth of GDP so that is not a problem. And if we look up on the current account Russia's exports so far this year has fallen by 30 percent but imports have fallen by 39 percent. These are dramatic numbers. And Russia's GDP in dollar terms according to the IMF this year because of a falling exchange rate will be down to 1.2 trillion dollars rather than 2.1 trillion dollars last year. So in dollar terms Russia is now one and a half percent of a global GDP rather than three percent of GDP as it was a year ago. So these are dramatic things. And you wonder what does it mean for the people. The real wages so far this year have fallen by about nine percent. So this is where we are seeing the big blow in the Russian economy. GDP not so much. The official forecast for this year from the Minister of Economy of Russia is 3.3 percent decline. The IMF has slightly more decline. I would expect something more. But I wouldn't say that people said that the Russian economy will collapse, decline, yes. And we are seeing a substantial decline, a decline of four percent or so. That is a big decline. All right. Great. Just briefly. Just briefly. Yeah, really briefly. That is certainly part of that is true. But if you start digging into that, take a international trade for instance. That's true Russian exports and the import dropped dramatically like 30 percent. But that is only on the value basis. As we all know that oil price, gold price, metals, commodity markets are in decline now. So the price for that commodities, these are considered to be maybe half 70 percent of Russian exports. The price for that volume is declined. But if you look at the volume thing, right, so the size of the exports in natural terms, take it for instance the Russian U.S. trade. Russian exports to the United States in volume terms increased for the first half of 2015, 8 percent. Despite drop of 30 percent in value. Great. So Channing and Lucy, you guys have, okay. I think Dev's got a question over here. And well, and then Raymond's got a question. So let's actually, let's take two of them right now. So we'll do Dev and then the fellow back here. Dev Kar, Chief Economist, GFI. Well, I have just two comments. One is that the current situation is kind of unique. I mean, when we're talking about the link between illicit flows and oil prices, we had sort of a relatively more stable economy with less crisis and less political crisis. Right now, this is a pretty unique situation with sanctions and the crisis in Ukraine. So that relationship between oil prices and illicit flows is not quite, we can't be extrapolated into the current situation. So that's one. So in other words, if you have this oil prices decline, that doesn't necessarily mean that illicit flows will decline because the other factors that drive illicit flows like macroeconomic crisis and uncertainty, risk and so on and so forth, also is on the ascendancy and so that will create a bigger driver for illicit flows. So I'm not sure how it's going to come out on the balance, but those are open questions. The other comment I would like to make is that I really wanted to study the role of Cyprus and other tax havens in the absorption of illicit flows from Russia. But unfortunately, the BIS, the Bank of International Settlements, would not simply give us data from the deposits coming out from a country to another country. In other words, there's no data that will let us map A to B kind of transactions. They will say that we can give you data from a group of countries, capital coming out from a group of countries, going into a group of countries. Well, that's no good to us. So, you know, there's always a data problem. And if I'm not able to back up the evidence with data, I usually don't talk about it. So then we'll take the one from the guy over here as well. It's our Stephen Dockery, the Wall Street Journal. My question is related to the data and compared to the 2013 report. It seems to be an order of magnitude larger in terms of the financial total inflows and outflows. I want to make sure I understand that totally. And why is that? Is there a different methodology or are the numbers different just in the last few years? Yeah, so I know GFI ended up updating its methodology between the 2013 report and the release of this one. And so I'll actually hand it back to Dev maybe quickly just to explain. Yes, Russia, the Russian central bank is one of the very few central banks in the world that publishes data on capital flight. And therefore I would like to be on record appreciating, you know, this fact that it is there for the whole world to see. And in fact, those numbers are even quoted by the IMF. So it's the IMF country reports. So it's very helpful to us. But so in order to be consistent with that methodology, which also includes licit outflows, we adopted a methodology that can be directly comparable to what the central bank is putting out. But our recent methodology in the last couple of years, we have been focusing solely on the illicit capital that is coming out. But that is, well, the illicit capital is still a huge portion, the majority of the portion of total capital flows out of Russia. But we just wanted to be a little bit consistent with what the central bank is putting forward. So is that different then? So I know between 2013 and the end of 2013, GFI updated to look at bilateral trade discrepancies as opposed to looking at discrepancies of, say, Russia with the world. They were looking at Russia with the U.S., Russia with the U.K., Russia with China, Russia with, et cetera. Well, yes. If you want to go to that level of detail, the thing is, yes. I mean, we also have revised the way we estimate trade misinvoicing. There was a comment that we did not correct for the antipod trade involving Hong Kong, for example, which might lead to some double counting. So once you take out the reexports from Hong Kong, the illicit flows went down a little bit. And this was a comment by Brookings, and we took that on board. But then I started thinking that if there is a methodology that for legitimate reasons lowers the illicit outflows, there is also legitimate reasons that we're not taking into account currently that will up the illicit flows. And that is basically when you consider the fact that traders don't trade with something called industrial countries. There's no such thing. It's a statistical construct. Advanced countries, industrial countries. Previously, we compared a developing countries trade with the group of industrial countries. But when traders actually misinvoice, they misinvoice with regard to specific countries, not a group, because that doesn't exist in his head. So when we did that country by country, the illicit flows came out much larger. So in that sense, also, there is a change. I think that was the biggest boost we saw in the Russian number. It came from that update in the methodology. Right, thank you. So I'm going to hand it over to Raymond. But first, I just wanted to build off of what you said about the BIS data. We had the data panel yesterday, and there was a few different wish lists of data. And it didn't come up at the time, the BIS data, how great it would be to have data on particular one country to another country, what economists, what people, researchers could do with that, and getting the BIS to publish that data. There's no reason that that should be confidential data. It would be key for research in this area. So hand it over to Raymond. Obviously, GFI studies flows, but I would like to ask a question about stocks of money abroad. Anders, you and I have talked and I forget whether you have addressed the question publicly or privately as to the amount of assets held outside of Russia by government officials. Do you have an estimate of that at the present time? Second question that I would like to ask is about gun for its structure. Was it affected at all by sanctions that were put in place against individuals? What's the nature of that now? All right, Anders. First, let me just concur with what Deb said here about the Central Bank of Russia. The Central Bank of Russia has an excellent website for statistics, publishes about one week afterwards, for each week, reserves there are, and it's available both in Russian and English, and it's very good to operate for all kinds of purposes. So this is the best Central Bank website I actually watch on, and it has not deteriorated in any way. One Raymond's question here about stocks, I don't know where it comes from. There is a number moving around $700 billion of total private Russian assets abroad, and I would guess that out of that, perhaps 100 to 200 are government officials, but that is only a guess. This is the dignities we are talking about, and it's quite well with the numbers that you have here. Of course, you get a certain interest rate or return on the money when you hold them. So Russian money held abroad is a very substantial amount, and if we take a biggest private Russian group, Alpha Group, has now set up letter one with an official capital of $27 billion that is based in London. And this is a perfectly legal company, so the money is big, but I don't have any assessment. Gunvar is very interesting. Immediately after Gennady Timchenko was sanctioned, was in March last year, he sold his share of, whatever it was, 33% of Gunvar to his partner, the Swedish citizen, Tobjan Tönkvist. So this is a deal between a Swedish and a Finnish citizen. And after that, now recently, the US government went after other assets of Timchenko's. So he is seriously being pursued by the US authorities, and personally had to move, as I mentioned, from Geneva, where a beautiful lakeside villa to Moscow, and where he lives on the Moscow Hill in an old political bureau villa just beside Moscow State University. And he can't use a mastercard, so you have to use the Chinese credit card, poor thing. Life is hard, but more importantly, both his and Arkady Rothenberg's fortunes, according to Forbes, in one year have fallen by 40%. Sorry, I shouldn't say the number, but it fell very substantially. So they are off for a hard time. And also, Timchenko and Rothenberg, the two main cronies of Putin, they were supposed to be general contractors of Silla, Siberia, the power of Siberia, the big pipeline from Yakutsia to China. And it turned out that they couldn't do it because the Chinese were not ready to give them bank credits, because they were afraid of the U.S. sanctions and did not want to be sanctioned. And Rothenberg and Timchenko had to give up the general contracting of this major pipeline, which would be something in the order of $25 billion, and give it to other people. And after that, Kaspram has been forced to cut the financing because the Chinese are not putting up the money to anybody else either. So they have really suffered quite hard, and one should not underestimate the impact of these sanctions on the people, in particular, since they have fallen up, and one kid of Rothenberg has been sanctioned also. So the U.S. authorities, that is, the U.S. pressure has turned out to be quite consistent in these sanctions, and Rothenberg has also been forced to sell admittedly to his son, one of his major most oppressed, one of his main construction companies. So they are not of a run that would be an exaggeration, but in a highly defensive position. So the U.S. sanctions do have an impact. Peter, I want to give you, because you were involved in the sanctions policy to comment on that. I just would echo what Anders said. I mean, I think if you look at the sanctions on some of the cronies of President Putin, like the Rothenberg brothers, like Mr. Timchenko, you have really seen it have an impact on their business operations. Now, Gunnvore, for those of you who don't know, is a big Swiss-based commodities trading firm, oil trading firm that Timchenko co-founded and co-owned. As Anders said, he basically at the same time he was being hit by sanctions, Timchenko sold his shares. I don't know the details of that deal. I'm going to guess at something approaching a fire sale price to his partner. And Gunnvore, given that Timchenko is not no longer an owner of it, has broadly, I understand from various public accounts, been able to continue its business operations. But I do think that Timchenko himself has been hit quite hard. I think that's reflected in the Forbes statistics. They're also little anecdotally reports. He apparently can no longer get services or spare parts for his, I don't remember what's the Cessna. It's a U.S.-made private jet that he no longer can get spare parts for. So, you know, there are various sort of impediments of that nature, sort of practical impediments as well. And I think we're going to continue to see those impacts play out over time. I also think just to echo what Anders has said, you know, I think that there was a view last year by some of these cronies, and frankly by some Russian government officials as the sanctions came in, they'd be able to turn to the Chinese for support and relief. And that's just not what we've seen happen. I mean, at a political level there have been various political deals signed between Russia and China, including on energy. But we've, broadly speaking, at an operational business level seen individual Chinese companies avoid wanting to do business with specific sanctioned individuals like Timchenko and the Rotenberg brothers. And we've also seen, at sort of a corporate level, we've seen the Chinese prove very reluctant to actually backfill the financing, to actually kind of go in and provide financing for these projects that Western banks are no longer involved in. So I think it's actually played out, you know, as U.S. officials, broadly speaking, at Hope, that we're seeing, you know, impact both at a sort of macro business level and then also with some of these individual cronies. Let me add here, Raymond, you asked about Gunvar and I also answered about Timchenko. Gunvar has divested from Russia. They had a couple of major investment projects and they thought it was too dangerous. They thought that they were in danger of being sanctioned with the suspicion since it's a private company we can't really know who owns what. So therefore they divested from Russia and they have also stopped trading in Russian oil. So they have been very badly hit. So I think do we have time for one more question or are we, no? All right, I guess that's it. So we're going to have to wrap things up but we'll continue the discussions over coffee and whatnot. So thank you everybody. Thanks again to our panelists and... Thank you gentlemen. Very interesting discussion and complex factors affecting the Russian economy. Interesting to hear how transparent the Russian central bank is given the amount of opaque, elicit money flowing out of the economy is quite stark but issues related to exchange rate changes and commodity prices and oil prices certainly affecting the economy. We want to thank all our panelists, Dr. Ashlyn Peter Harrell, Evgeny Smulov and Clark Gascoin for his moderating. Thanks very much.