Russian bankers shuffled personal wealth offshore long before latest sanctions, Pandora Papers show

Russian bankers, oligarchs and others with ties to the Kremlin “know fully well that they’re vulnerable to sanctions and would have taken steps to ensure that identifying their assets is as difficult as possible,” Tom Keatinge, director of the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies in London, said in an interview. If governments don’t also target the proxies and shell companies that support these elites, he said, “the sanctions are not worth anything.”