There’s a problem with the remote and sprawling network of pipelines and pumping stations that helps Russia move its vast oil resources, making it the world’s second largest exporter of crude.
People are stealing the oil.
And it’s not just ordinary citizens: It’s sophisticated organized crime groups, operating under the protection of law enforcement officers, including Russia’s main security agency, the FSB, siphoning off oil using illegal taps and hoses, pumping the liquid loot from pipelines into tanker trucks or river barges.
And it’s just not just a couple of barrels.
By one estimate, from state-owned bank VTB Capital, as much as $3.5 billion is lost annually due to oil theft. Losses to the Russian budget? As much $1.2 billion a year.
It’s one of a more than a dozen major investigations conducted this year throughout Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus, and South and Central Asia by RFE/RL reporters.
What European cities did politically connected insiders in Kazakhstan park their money in? Who was in fact behind the grisly unsolved murders of Iranian intellectuals around the world between 1988 and 1998?
Here are some of the other highlights of RFE/RL’s investigative work over the past year.
When German police entered the Bonn apartment on August 6, 1992, they found the body of a renowned Iranian entertainer, poet, and dissident who had fled his home country after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
It was shocking enough to find a switchblade in Fereydoun...
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