Will pressure from the United States, fear of losing the last dollar correspondent account and an impending vote on admission into the OECD finally force Latvia to curb the laundering of dirty money for shady figures from the former Soviet Union via Latvia’s non-resident banks?

A disgraced Russian banker, an Estonian-born advertising guru and Baltic oil traders kept money in Switzerland away from the prying eyes of the local tax authorities.

Attempts to take an acclaimed Latvian whistleblower to court more than three years after he released embarrassing tax details of the country’s elite are raising serious questions about due legal process in the Baltic state.

In the absence of any official confirmation, available evidence suggests that PrivatBank could be the Latvian bank fined by the Latvian Financial and Capital Market Commission (FCMC) earlier this year for inadequate internal controls in the so-called Magnitsky case. The FCMC, however, refuses to reveal the identity of the sanctioned bank, citing the need to maintain financial stability.

How Average Latvians Became Paper Directors in Transactions Worth Millions.

The prosecutor’s office has reversed the decision of the state police not to investigate whether Latvian banks helped to launder at least 63 million dollars from Russia in 2007 as part of a huge tax fraud.

Sergei Magnitsky was a lawyer for Hermitage Capital (an American managed fund investing in Russia) who tried to investigate the theft of money from the fund. His colleagues at Hermitage Capital believe it possible that part of the 63 million dollars laundered through Latvian banks after being stolen from the fund could still be in Latvia.

The Latvian parliamentary committee’s findings on failures of regulating Krajbanka follow an earlier series of stories by the investigative journalism centre Re:Baltica on Antonov and the breakdown of regulation that preceded the collapse of Krajbanka and Snoras.

As Russian tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky slowly died in a Russian prison from abuse and neglect, US$230 million (5.4 billion Russian Rubles) in taxes stolen from his client disappeared into a maze of phantom companies, crooked banks and offshore accounts. Magnitsky, accused of the largest tax scam in Russian state history despite being the whistleblower who reported it, knew who pulled off the theft but not who the powerful people behind them were.