Terrorist sponsors named

Only citizens and organizations which have been found guilty or had their activities stopped in Russia are included in the list. The “Russian” part of the list includes the Congress of Ichkeria and Dagestani Peoples, the National Bolshevik Party, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration and more than 1,500 individuals.

The list of the organizations and citizens laundering money and financing terrorists was drawn up by Rosinfmonitoring. The document consists of two parts. The first part contains foreign organizations and citizens: Al Qaida, Harakat al-Shabaab of Somali and militants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somali. The information was provided by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Russia, according to the official lists of the UN.

The second part – the Russian one – was listed by the Minister of Justice and the General Prosecution Service of Russia. Individuals are registered there after sentences for “terrorist” articles of the Criminal Code. There 46 organizations there. Most of the individuals are from Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan. It is stressed that the list has not been fully published.

A member of the committee for financial markets of the State Duma, Pavel Medvedev, says the list is a right decision.

- Publication of the list is a reasonable step. Previously, the law said that a bank, if it deals with a person who is mixed up with money laundering or terrorism, had to take certain measures. However, the list was secret and the bank couldn’t do anything.

- But only the freely-accessed part of the list was published. There is a secret part, which includes extremist and terrorist suspects.

- Nothing can be done with it. If a person is only under suspicion, we cannot include him in the list.

The editor-in-chief of Vestnik Kavkaz, Aleksey Vlasov, said that the publication is a good step, but ineffective:

- The document lies in the sphere of psychology, as it shows the readiness of the Russian authorities to announce openly the names of people involved in money laundering. As for the Caucasian part of the list, there are people who finance terrorists of the North Caucasus. The region is a headache for our force structures.

- The Russian government is trying to stabilise the situation in the Caucasus. For example, the head of Ingushetia, Yunus-bek Yevkurov, has proposed giving the bodies of militants to their relatives for burial. He considers this initiative to be an effective measure.

- I support the idea of taking local the mentality, traditions and customs into account. Sometimes it is contrary to legal norms, but the necessity to take local specifics into consideration is reasonable.

Radio Svoboda