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Euronews
11-04-2025
- Business
- Euronews
European companies risk sanctions breaches amid surge in shady transactions, report claims
ADVERTISEMENT The number of European companies unwittingly involved in business transactions with countries or entities subject to sanctions is growing, with a notable surge taking place since 2022 and the start of Russia's war in Ukraine. That uptick was first outlined in the "Kleptotrace" report by Transcrime , a research centre at the Catholic University of Milan, which was presented this week to Europol, the EU police cooperation agency based in The Hague. The study was co-funded by the European Union and focused mainly on sanctions imposed by the bloc on Russia and Kremlin-linked oligarchs since 2014, the year of Moscow's unilateral annexation of Crimea, which have been ramped up since the 2022 full-scale invasion. The report illustrates how dense, shadowy networks of intermediary companies — often fictitious and represented by frontmen — are operating in jurisdictions not aligned with the sanctions regimes and have turned sanctions into lucrative money-making machines. Rescuers work on the site of a factory bombed by Russian forces in Dnipro, 10 April, 2025 AP Photo Companies at risk Unsuspecting European companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), often fall foul of these schemes, as they lack the necessary tools and security infrastructure to recognise potential risk partners. "The measures were introduced very quickly and the larger economic operators were able to set up adaptation systems," Giovanni Nicolazzo, a researcher at Transcrime and co-author of the report, explained to Euronews. "Small and medium-sized companies, on the other hand, continue to have difficulties in assessing the sanction risk of their stakeholders," he added. Obtaining reliable information about the organisations companies do business with costs time and money. And in the absence of automated systems, it then becomes a matter for transnational investigations using professional firms — often involving lawyers and accountants — which can leave an SME with an exorbitant bill. The exterior view of the Europol headquarters in The Hague, 2 December, 2016 AP Photo "In addition to identifying the company's owner, it is necessary to reconstruct the entire supply chain, right down to the end users," Nicolazzo said. "Those who do not have access to adequate tools or databases end up relying on simple self-declarations by the supplier or customer, which alone are not enough." But for experts and investigators, a self-declaration is too easy to submit and not a sufficient enough background check. The sectors most exposed to this type of incident are electronic components, mechanical engineering, aeronautics and technologies for both civil and military purposes. The European Union has initiated a process to help companies with this process. Called the EU Sanctions Helpdesk , it aims to assist primarily SMEs to conduction due diligence on who exactly they're working with. Companies and anonymous shareholdings According to Transcrime's research, the very ownership structures of many European companies could belong to entities subject to sanctions. ADVERTISEMENT At the time Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine started, thousands of companies within the EU and in Ukraine and other European countries were owned by at least 342 nationals of the Russian Federation who were subject to sanctions. The Kleptotrace report also says that in the first months of 2022, almost 10,000 companies were owned by sanctioned persons. And these are just the official, known figures. However, the responsibility for implementing sanctions remains at the national level, and sometimes, that is insufficient. ADVERTISEMENT Two men walk past a currency exchange office in Moscow after the US sanctioned the Moscow Exchange, 13 June, 2024 AP Photo Stephen Piccinino, an official of the Malta Financial Services Authority, says that in wartime circumstances "a state that is serious about enforcing sanctions should investigate the activities of large conglomerates in its national territory." "Be particularly careful if it possesses resources such as precious metals. And above all, check for internal corruption, particularly if there are any domestic politicians with past links to sanctioned individuals or entities," Piccinino told Euronews. A statistical update is currently being carried out by the Transcrime research centre. Although the final figures aren't yet available, researchers conclude that the number of companies linked to sanctioned Russian entities — either directly or indirectly — may not have decreased sufficiently since 2022. ADVERTISEMENT Global finance, local corruption The dense network of global financial markets offers protected channels to those wanting to evade sanctions. Very often, these are the same routes used by organised crime for money laundering operations, as revealed by Europol in its EU Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2025 report published in March. Experience and banking contacts accumulated by corrupt political sectors are crucial to sanctions evasion networks. "If, for example, I am a corrupt politician from a European country and I want to conclude a transaction to build energy infrastructure in a sanctioned country, I can conclude the contractual agreement, and I receive the payments via a risky but non-sanctioned country to the terminal bank account in my country, because I know that my bank does not do the necessary checks," Piccinino explained. Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting at the Kremlin in Moscow, 9 April, 2025 Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Sputnik Piccinino further explained that in his experience, intermediary banks are located "in well-known countries" such as Caribbean nations and are financial entities already in contact with "banks that do not apply the so-called know-your-customer procedures and also have poor transaction control systems." ADVERTISEMENT According to Transcrime, most frequently under the lens of national authorities are sectoral sanctions evasions, which account for 80% of all evasion cases. Sectoral sanctions are measures against entire industrial or service sectors. The companies involved are often intermediary companies — or so-called paper companies — that formally exist but have no real economic activity, with fictitious headquarters and insubstantial assets. "Often these are entities that would have no economic justification for acquiring such assets. A thorough audit would reveal suspicious addresses, links with other similar companies and the absence of indicators of real operations," Nicolazzo clarified. Related EU expands sanctions against Russia to ban luxury goods and energy investments As sanctions bite, how much economic pain is Putin willing to take? EU sanctions Russian officials accused of 'systematic' sexual violence against Ukrainian women According to the Kleptotrace report, on average, three paper companies and at least five countries are involved between the seller and the buyer in every transaction that circumvents sanctions. ADVERTISEMENT The payment methods are those typical of organised crime, namely bank transactions through offshore accounts and the exchange of luxury goods, such as large pieces of jewellery, real estate, and shares. Europol has already highlighted how difficult it is to effectively restrict economic exchanges in the context of high interdependence between states, private companies and transnational criminal networks.
Boston Globe
06-02-2025
- Health
- Boston Globe
Sleepovers are a rite of passage for kids. And a battleground for parents.
Like so many other aspects of parenting, sleepovers have become a cultural flash point. Videos cautioning against sleepovers get millions of views on TikTok, and parent groups on Facebook are rife with warnings about guns, social media, vaping, and substance abuse. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy Advertisement There should be, he argued, 'more math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons.' So are sleepovers proof that American parents have gotten something very wrong? Are we tied to a symbol of late-20th century mediocrity? Condon and Nicolazzo represent, in some ways, our increasingly polarized approach to parenting. On one side is the free-range view: let kids bike around town, walk to the store, spend unstructured time with their classmates down the street. On the other side is a deep concern about — and increasing awareness of — the world's dangers. Nicolazzo says that as an adult she discovered that some friends had been sexually abused, making her aware of how much could go wrong. Nicolazzo's children, who are now older, frequently did Psychiatrist Advertisement 'Increasingly, what I've seen is more and more concerns that parents have about their kids' safety,' Beresin says. Beresin, who's also a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, emphasizes that while some of those dangers existed 40 years ago, internet-related dangers did not. He believes the world has indeed grown more dangerous. But he also notes that our perception of that danger has been amplified, in large part by both the news media and social media. On October 14, 1987, an 18-month-old girl fell into a well in Midland, Texas. Her name was Jessica McClure, and, almost immediately, throngs of media descended on Midland to chronicle the massive effort to pull her to safety. The story of Baby Jessica was In the moments when McClure emerged from the well on October 16, more than 3 million people were glued to CNN. Rescuers had heard the toddler singing Winnie-the-Pooh songs 22 feet below them, and the race to hoist her to the surface was filled with tension. 'Everybody in America became godmothers and godfathers of Jessica while this was going on,' then-President Ronald Reagan said. Advertisement The Baby Jessica story ushered us into a new era of cable news, an era in which round-the-clock live television trained the nation's attention on the distress of a single child, an era of amplified focus on tragic accidents, kidnappings, and disappearances. We saw that in the unrelenting coverage of Elizabeth Smart's kidnapping in 2002, and in the media frenzy that surrounded Madeleine McCann's disappearance from her bed in Portugal in 2007. Beresin says that as media coverage of far-flung events has escalated, so has our sense of danger. Both parents and children now have access to deeply concerning stories from across the world. Nicolazzo agrees that our access to information has changed dramatically. 'You're hearing what happens all around the country,' she says. 'You hear what happens to a kid in a park somewhere.' During COVID, particularly, ' All of us were inundated with with a ton of digital media that was basically saying: 'The world is not a safe place. My kids are not really safe,'' Beresin says. 'Do I want them to be in a place where I don't know the parents?' Anne Mostue, a teacher from Lincoln, told me that, in her view, 'COVID killed spontaneity.' In the late '80s and '90s, she says, when she was growing up, there was an 'ease of kids getting together,' but that was 'stunted' by the pandemic. As a kid, Mostue mostly slept over at a couple of good friends' houses. They listened to Tori Amos and Nirvana, and talked about plans for the future. She remembers once 'logging onto AOL, and there were all these chat rooms. I remember that my friends' parents were angry because it tied up the phone line, and they almost immediately kicked us off.' Advertisement . Allie Sullberg for The Boston Globe She loves the idea of her two children, who are still too young for sleepovers, getting to spend unstructured time with their friends. 'But I also think that our culture has opened up in a good way about the things that can happen at sleepovers,' Mostue says. She plans to ask parents a few questions before she lets her children sleep at their house: Do you have guns and how do you store them? What older siblings and adults will be in the house? How do you monitor screen time and internet use? 'I plan to ask the questions in a very friendly way,' she says. 'And if people think I'm crazy and they don't like my questions, that's fine.' 'COVID changed how people operate, and I think it was definitely for the worse,' says Courtney Yakavonis, a Newton mom of three who has mostly embraced sleepovers. She notes that play dates now tend to be pre-planned and that people rarely 'pop over' to see each other, as they might have a generation or two ago. Packed schedules have also changed how parents operate. Lots of children are on traveling soccer teams, or enrolled in nighttime or weekend math classes (to Ramaswamy's delight, no doubt). If sleepovers were once born of boredom, such boredom has now, largely, been banished. Children are 'working 24/7,' Beresin says. 'They're taking honors courses. They're doing community service. They have to do three sports. They have to play the Suzuki violin.' He says that when he was a child, he sometimes had so little to do that he went looking for people to play basketball or ride bikes with him. 'I think kids are overbooked, and they don't have a chance, an opportunity — as much as they did in the past — to experiment.' Advertisement Brain science bolsters both those who are cautious about sleepovers, and those who are not. On the one hand, research has long shown that our brains aren't fully developed until our early or mid-20s, which is, in part, why teens make lots of questionable decisions. But psychological studies also support the idea of embracing risk. As the journal Nature noted in January, 'Research has emerged showing that opportunities for risky play are crucial for healthy physical, mental and emotional development.' Though, the article quickly added, 'In many nations, risky play is now more restricted than ever.' When parents ask Beresin what to do about children who are invited to attend sleepovers, he says, 'Look, you've got to give them a certain amount of freedom, autonomy, separation, independence, ability to take control. And at the same time, you've got to have a safety net. And it's your job as parents to decide with your kid, collaboratively, what will keep you safe and what won't.' For some parents, that will mean having a code word that a child can text if they're feeling uncomfortable at a sleepover. Then the parent can call and say they have to pick the child up, and the child can pretend to blame their crazy, overprotective parents for hustling them home at midnight. For other parents, that might be always having sleepunders, during which children can eat junk food and talk frankly with their friends, even if they duck out before everyone goes to sleep. ' It's not one-size-fits-all,' says Beresin. 'One kid may be able to go to a sleepover and another kid might not.' Nicolazzo thinks that, while it's critical to protect your children, you don't want to make them overly anxious. 'I think my husband and I did a good job of playing the fine line. Both of our kids are extremely independent, very social.' Condon believes there are more parents like Nicolazzo than like her, but she's not afraid to defend her approach. ' I do think we've over-rotated on safety a little bit,' she says. Take COVID, for example. 'You could stay home in your house and never get sick, or you can figure out how to wash your hands and do the mask and do all the things, and live life.' The polarization on this issue — as on so many others — reflects increasingly large social divisions, says Beresin. And those divisions go beyond Fox News vs. MSNBC — they reach into all aspects of our lives. Are there ways, he wonders, that 'we as parents, caregivers, teachers, coaches, mentors, journalists, can have more balanced viewpoints? And actually see both sides of the issue?' Perhaps, but it's not a muscle we're used to flexing. Follow Kara Miller
