Babies for sale

In 1997 three girls were transported to Thessaloniki by a Russian woman, the girls were 18-24 months old. The woman was arrested by police; she formed part of an international child trafficking gang. The newspapers of the day reported how the three children were to have their organs harvested and sold to the black market organ trade. Nobody can know for certain what their fate would have been. In Greece, a controversial law had been ratified just a year earlier, in 1996, and it is still in force today, that law permits private adoption arrangements, i.e. direct dealings between biological and adoptive parents, without the need for any agency intervention. Since then, hundreds – maybe thousands, we just can’t know with any degree of certainty, of children like Dimitra travel from countries like Bulgaria to Greece. Some are given up for private adoption. Others are victims of sexual exploitation, or the black market organ trade.

Dimitra had never seen the newspaper report or images of the woman arrested for bringing her to Greece, we showed it to her for the first time, her reaction was almost emotionally passive “there is such evil in the world”. Yes, it was a long time ago. She had had a good childhood at the Greek Children’s Village a nonprofit organization based in Thessaloniki, and now she was trying to get on with her life. However, in terms of the Greek State, she is still considered to be invisible. “I don’t have a birth certificate, so I can’t get an Identity Card. I feel like I’m nobody. That’s what you are if you don’t have an Identity Card, you’re a nobody”, she tells us. One of the reasons that Dimitra is enmeshed in the bureaucratic procedure of obtaining an Identity Card is because she needs to change her surname. When the three girls were rescued by the Authorities, attempts were made to find their biological parents in Russia. Dimitra’s parents weren’t ever found, this resulted in the Police registering Dimitra with the care organization under the surname of the woman who attempted to sell her. From left to right, in the dock, the woman who transported the tree girls to Thessaloniki. Source: Newspaper Angelioforos, 9 October 1997.

“I don’t have a birth certificate, so I can’t get an Identity Card. I feel like I’m nobody.”

The 1996 Adoption Law includes provisions for private adoptions; it fills in the gaps of its predecessor the 1970 Adoption Law. For example, it provides for the adoption of children born out of wedlock, and also enacts the right of the child to find out who its biological parents are after the age of eighteen. Private adoptions were intended to deal with the unbelievable amount of bureaucracy which resulted in many many years of delay in the adoption procedure (an adoption arranged by a public agency 3 may take up to three or four years to complete); this is what childless couples were faced with when going through the state sponsored adoption procedure. However, there were many objections to the law at the time that it was travelling through parliament; there were concerns that child trafficking networks could easily take advantage of its provisions.

The committee charged with drafting the law had justified its position to permit private adoptions as follows: “Prohibiting private adoptions would increase the incidence of falsified birth registrations”. However, reliable sources inform us that the phenomenon of falsely registering the birth of a child in a clinic under the adoptive mother’s name is still rife today. In accordance with a Report by the Children’s Commissioner, private adoptions often conceal financial transactions and are a factor in the proliferation of child trafficking.

Since the law came into force, Authorities have, from time-to-time, dismantled complex networks involved in child trafficking in Greece, via Albania and the Former Soviet Union. These crimes increased after neighbouring Bulgaria became a full member of the European Union in 2007. Since then, the incidence of pregnant Roma women living in squalid conditions in camps in Bulgaria falling victim to child trafficking networks is on the rise. These women are transported to Greece to give birth in public hospitals, they then sell their newborn babies for a small amount of money. In some cases, these women may also form part of a baby factory, generating unspeakable profits for the traffickers. In the Balkans there is a price list for babies: A child can cost between 15.000 and 30.000 Euros, according to gender (boys are usually more expensive), eye or skin colour. The biological mother is paid just 1500 Euros, and in some cases, only the return fare to Bulgaria. The fair-haired child nicknamed “Maria” front page New York Times, 22 October 2013.

In October 2013 police raided a Roma camp in Farsala, a town in Central Greece where they discovered a young fair-haired girl with blue eyes, she looked very different to everybody else. The child was nicknamed “Maria” and it soon became 4 clear through local and international media that the girl’s biological mother was a woman living in a Bulgarian slum. This case uncovered the failings in the system in Greece that permits the unobstructed trafficking of pregnant women and children. Since 2013 two identical cases have been discovered in Larissa. We decided to research the story at source.

POBEDA GHETTO

We went to Bulgaria, we met with women who told us that they had sold their babies in Greece and we tried to figure out how the child trafficking networks are exploiting the Adoption law in Greece. We started out in the city of Burgas, a commercial port on the Black Sea. With a population of 200.000, it is the country’s fourth largest. Burgas has repeatedly been voted by the Bulgarians as the city with best quality of life, despite high rates of criminality. This is particular noticeable in Pobeda, a Roma ghetto near the port. A large part of the ghetto is cut off from the city by means of a perimeter wall. Naked children play in muddy waters, and as we approach the centre of the slum, which is home to 12.000 people, we see why this is classified as one of the EU’s poorest regions. Pobeda, the Roma camp in the town of Burgas.

In Pobeda we are undesirable aliens and all eyes are fixed on us. There are two tiers of leadership here, lawful religious leaders and shady leaders, with a rich criminal record in illegal trafficking, theft and the trafficking of pregnant women.

We headed for the centre of Pobeda. The first woman whom we met gesticulated to us that hunger prevailed and that women got pregnant here in order to make a living. 5 In full view of the police who accompanied us, and with disarming candour, Galena Raicheva, an emaciated figure with lively eyes, told us that she had sold one of her children in Greece.

“I paid off my debts and repaired my roof with the money that I was paid”. We follow her into her humble shack, the only place we are able to speak in private. “I was taken to Greece to a hospital to give birth by these men from Kameno (a small town on the outskirts of Burgas). I gave birth to a baby girl and I gave her up. I only nursed her for three days. A Greek man took the child. I was given three 500 Euro notes. “The intermediaries are the ones who make lots of money”, says Raicheva. “I feel very bad about it, but what can I do? It hurts to think about what I have done, look at how the worry and regrets have affected me”. “I gave birth to a baby girl that I gave away. I only nursed her for three days”, Raicheva (centre) tells us that she had sold one of her children in Greece for 1500 Euros.

“How could a mother sell her child?”

Our instinctive reaction was to judge her, albeit silently. “How could a mother sell her child?” Even those of us who had declared that we were atheists at the beginning of this trip seemed affected by a genetic Christian moral code as we grappled with the rights and wrongs on opposing sides of the arguments. And the longer we spent in the camp, the more we realized that these women weren’t the offenders, they were the victims of child selling networks.

In the Maternity Clinic of the State Burgas Hospital, the obstetrician Antonio Dushepeev tells us that he comes across pregnant Roma women as young as twelve. “They don’t go to hospital during their pregnancy and they have many problems during childbirth. As a father of two daughters, I feel very sorry for these women. And I also regret the fact that having a baby at such a young age means that they are likely to miss out on gaining an education or getting a job. They will suffer and so will their children”.

Back in Pobeda, Chief of Police, Stamat Hristov, knows only too well which women have sold their children on, and who the child traffickers are. He maintains, however, that Greece is the source of the problem. “The problem is that it is facilitated. We are talking about legislation in neighbouring countries. The transactions are all done overseas. The sellers are here. They are women from the lowest levels of society, living in squalid conditions. They are plagued by regrets and often testify against the traffickers”, Hristov informs us. “Women come here because they want to, we don’t force them”, says Bogdan, accused of trafficking pregnant women.

As we walk through the ghetto with the Chief of Police, a man approaches him. He is wearing blue shorts and his naked body is heavily tattooed. Bogdan Shterionov is the brother of the infamous Pandurito, one of the unofficial leaders of Pobeda, who exercises great influence. Both had served time for trafficking pregnant women. Bogdan is proud of the tattoos that he had done whilst in prison and when we ask him what he was in for, he hesitates for a moment and then pipes up “for child trafficking” and smiling he opens his arms over his belly as if he were pregnant. “I was innocent, I was sent down for ten years for nothing. I didn’t sell any children”, he says. But, when we ask him for his opinion on women who sell their babies, he replies: “They approach us voluntarily, they are homeless. We don’t force them to do it. There is a God up above. They usually have about four children and they want to buy a house. I tried to sell one and didn’t manage (…) I would have earned 8-10.000 Lev (4-5.000 Euros), I would have sold the child in Greece”.

Life is tough in Pobeda. People fish for a living, they sell scrap metal, they open small convenience stores. The only state benefit they receive is 35 Lev (17 Euros) per child a month. As if their predicament wasn’t hard enough, recently they are all being threatened with homelessness as the Bulgarian government wants to demolish their shacks, and they are enraged by the situation. The same evening we accompany a police night patrol in the heart of the ghetto. The situation is explosive. 7 The cameras aren’t welcome in the neighbourhood, and especially not by the shady leaders who declined invitations to meet with us. Children standing on car bonnets are laughing and making fun of our mesmerized faces. Some of them throw a bottle of water at us, others throw stones. We are truly undesirable.

PEOPLE IN BULGARIA ARE STARVING

Bulgaria has been a member of the EU since 2007; however it has the worse performing Member State economy. The minimum salary is about 200 Euros, and more than two out of every ten citizens live below the poverty line. The Roma community fares worse still because it is on the margins of society.

We travelled to Gorno Ezerovo a small village 15 kilometres from Burgas. We found dirt roads and people living in huts by the lake. Rumyana Hristova is a woman with scars on her face and hands, she was waiting for us outside her shack, with its wooden roof and gaping holes letting in the cold. All of the camp had gathered to catch a good look at the foreigners. They all knew Hristova’s story.

“I was living in a shack when I sold the baby. I didn’t want it to have the same fate as me, I wanted it to have a better life.”

“I have four children, one of my sons is in prison. I am unemployed, I don’t have any means of earning a living. My husband collects rubbish at the dump. He is unemployed. We are starving in Bulgaria”, she tells us. “In 2010 I discovered that I was pregnant. I was living in a shack when I sold the baby. I didn’t want it to have the same fate as me, I wanted it to have a better life. I didn’t have a house. Those people came and saw that I was pregnant. They asked me if I wanted to go to Greece, and I agreed. I went to Greece, gave birth and sold the baby. What else could I do?”. What she went on to say was just as poignant. “They gave me 2.000 Euros. I built this house, but I didn’t have enough money left over to pay off my debts. The following year I gave birth to another baby. I had to replace the boy that I gave away. What else could I do?”, she lamented. At that moment a boy entered the shack. The women embraced him: “I am no longer able to give a child away. It’s a sin”.

I AM NOT FOR SALE

We left the city of Burgas and travelled to Kameno, a town approximately 25 kilometres away. This is ground zero. It seems that this is where the golden trail of trafficking pregnant women to Greece commences. Zumbulka Shterionova is a pretty 20 year old woman, she is heavily pregnant with her fifth child. She gave birth to her first child when she was fifteen. She gave birth to her third child in Cyprus and sold it to a childless Greek couple. The traffickers deceived her and she never received the agreed payment. “I was duped into giving my baby away, to build a house so that the other children could have a home. They told me that I would get 3.500 Lev (1.700 Euros). But that’s not what happened. They took the child, they sold it, I signed, but I didn’t get any money at all. Luckily they put me on a plane, they didn’t leave me stranded. I reported it to the Police and they said that it’s going to court. The police know everything”, the young woman tells us. 8 Child trafficking is such a problem in Kameno, that children in a state nursery wear wristbands with the words “I am not for sale”.

Everyone in Kameno knows where the traffickers live. They live in two-storey “palaces”. In comparison to the other houses, theirs have balconies and courtyards, the difference is obvious to us as we walk through the roads of the small town. We put what we considered a reasonable question to the Authorities: Given that the traffickers are known, why aren’t they arrested? A Kameno police officer who asked for his identity to be kept anonymous, gave us this answer: “They have been arrested for the crime in Greece and they have been imprisoned there. This doesn’t mean that they committed the same crime in Bulgaria”. Then we asked why the women who sell their children are not prosecuted, and we received this reply. “Because they testify against the traffickers”.

The problem of child trafficking in Kameno is so great that at the State Nursery children wear a wristband that says “I am not for sale”. We enter a classroom very quietly during a lesson. The young students receive us enthusiastically raising their arms and then they start drawing and singing. The nursery practitioner Maria Ivanova is the soul of the program, which at its core aims to raise awareness amongst children and parents. “We are overwhelmed by events in our area. We are trying to teach children and their parents about family values, love and unity”, Ivanova tells us. She is personally informed of many instances of child trafficking to Greece, the nursery children tell stories of how “my uncle does it”, and mothers confide in her. 9 Maria Ivanova the nursery practitioner at Kameno. The children finish drawing and the teacher proudly shows us a drawing done by a little boy. “Raicho, well done, I see that you have drawn your parents and your twelve siblings. Your drawing is wonderful and it shows how much you love them”, she says and gives the boy a hug.

HUMAN WASTE

The highest profile case of child trafficking in Bulgaria was uncovered in the city of Varna, on the northeastern side, in the Roma camp at Maksuda. In 2011 a thirty year old woman changed her mind about selling her baby and wanted it back, so she went to authorities with details of the child trafficking network. As a result, seven people were arrested in Greece and five in Bulgaria. In Lamia, a city in central Greece, a newborn baby was discovered in the house of the boss of the network. We were given access to the “Lamia” casefile, and saw that Interpol had marked several items as “confidential”, and that these related to at least eight Bulgarian women whom had registered their babies in various registry offices in Greece, three in Volos and five in Lamia. The police investigation revealed that from 2007 to 2012, two hundred and forty-seven Bulgarian women had given birth in the County hospital of this Greek region. As a result, one hundred and seven Bulgarian babies were put up for private adoption.

The Roma camp in Maksuda, on the outskirts of the city of Varna, people live next to thousands of tons of waste, rats and syringes. If ever there was a living hell, it must be Maksuda on the outskirts of Varna where people are literally living next to thousands of tons of rubbish, with seagulls circling overhead. They put their lives at risk, rummaging for metal and plastic, competing with rats and trying to avoid syringes. We managed to meet up with the brother of the woman who was accused of acting as cashier of the child trafficking network in Lamia. He was in a wheelchair and told us that his sister had moved to Belgium. “This is all in the past. If you want a child, go to the institutions”, he advises us.

Against this desperate backdrop, volunteers from the NGO “Partnership” in Varna are trying to bring positive changes to the lives of the Roma. “Many boys here dream of becoming traffickers. It’s often a family enterprise handed down from father to son to grandson” Iliyan Rizov, head of the organization informs us. “The mothers are the victims of circumstance and they don’t come to the decisions alone. The responsibility lies mostly with their environment. When a mother considers selling her baby, she is actually thinking about the rest of her children. So, on the one hand, she is influenced by her environment, and on the other she faces the bleak prospect of raising another child in poverty”, explains Rizov.

And the message of the volunteers is this “Don’t sell your children. 500 Euros will cause you more grief than you could ever imagine“.

DEMAND IN GREECE

It was becoming clear that Greece was the source of demand feeding the baby trade. Illegal adoption is far from being a new phenomenon in Greece. Maksuda camp in Varna.

In the mid-90s the newspaper ΤΑ ΝΕΑ in Thessaloniki published a significant investigation into the baby trade which had existed in the shadows of this town for decades. The article was about the Russian Women’s Clinic (aka the State Hospital of Thessaloniki) in the sixties and the State Orphanage “Agios Stylianos”. It seems that an entire network consisting of doctors, midwives and various intermediaries had told poor women, many from small villages who already had large families, that their baby had died after delivery. The babies were subsequently left on the steps of the State Orphanage with notes supposedly signed by the mothers saying that they weren’t able to raise them. Over the years, network members made a fortune from these illegal adoptions.

These cases surfaced many years later when some of those adopted children tried to search for their biological parents, and set up a society. It was revealed that midwives and nurses had kept notes and personal effects left by the biological parents who believed that their baby had died. One of the journalists involved in the investigation, Georgios Chatsios recollects “people who had been adopted forty years ago started coming forward, they wanted the truth”. It is impossible to know with any degree of certainty how many children were adopted illegally in Thessaloniki in the sixties. “There were hundreds of cases. Some days we had as many as forty people in the YOUTH office, all wanting to tell their story, clutching on to photos and handwritten notes”. The first case brought to court was in the matter of the adoption of Supreme Court Judge Daniel Daniel’s son, the judge wanted to get to the truth and the Public Prosecutor’s case was based on the judge’s evidence.

The court accepted that an illegal adoption had taken place, however the crime could not be prosecuted due to the statute of limitations. In fact the statute of limitations meant that none of the other cases brought to court could be heard, and over the years, many of those involved (doctors, midwives, etc.) had passed away. A Roma family in the town of Kameno, on the outskirts of Burgas. A few years ago a trafficker had approached the father offering him enough money to build a house in exchange for a child. The family refused his offer.

Two decades on and state adoption procedures can still take up to five years. Greek couples want to adopt babies, and not five year old children. This has given rise to many childless couples going down the illegal route.

Eleni Gegle, an Athenian Lawyer and former associate of the Public Prosecutor of the Juvenile Court tells us “The Law is clear. It doesn’t allow for the exchange of money in the adoption procedure. Nevertheless this isn’t observed. In 95% of private adoption cases the adoptive parents pay money”, and she goes on “the basis for private adoptions is sound. The Law gives a childless couple the possibility of coming into direct contact with the biological parents wishing to give their child up for adoption, without receiving any financial gain (…). Often however, the legal paperwork drafted between the two parties, which is verified by the court, simply states that the two parties agree to the adoption proceeding, it doesn’t verify how the two parties were initially introduced”, notes Mrs Gegle.

Illegal adoptions are in effect legalized in the courts. This vicious circle could be broken if the Judge had the right to put further questions to the biological mother, notably “how did you meet the adoptive parents?”

Mrs Gegle goes on: “The courts in Athens hear private adoption cases on a Monday in building no. 6. It is notable how on that day that there is a prominent presence of women of a particular nationality, all being represented by the same lawyer.

Yes, a single lawyer may respresent nineteen out of the twenty-five cases appearing on the daily court list. It’s strange.” And she goes on: “Cases are also heard whereby the court is presented with evidence of women putting up nine children for adoption”.

It becomes even simpler if members of the medical profession are involved in the Greco-Bulgarian network. Instead of the biologicial mother’s details being registered at the hospital or maternity clinic, the adoptive mother’s details are registered. This does away with the need for the adoption to pass through court. The adoptive father then just needs to make a declaration at the Registry Office. From the cases examined in court over the past few years it has emerged that doctors, lawyers and other intermediaries formed part of these networks. Bulgarian Roma live in the EU’s poorest region. They are marginalized and suffer prejudice from the local community. Screenshot from the documentary “Babies for Sale”.

Even so, arrests are rare. Policewoman Sofia Kousidou, Head of Thessaloniki Police Child Protection Unit, explains that the last network was dismantled in 2013. “Greek legislation doesn’t incorporate illegal adoption as part of organized crime. This deprives the police from certain weapons in our questioning arsenal and limits the action that we would otherwise be able to take”, the Head of the CPU goes on “of course in the absence of an actual complaint its nigh on impossible for us to prove that the adoption involved a financial transaction”.

Given that it doesn’t seem to be in anybody’s interest to speak to the police, another solution would be to inspect Registry Office procedures systematically. That would be the first port of call to find out whether the same mother had previously given up any other children for adoption. That could provide grounds for informing the Juvenile Court immediately. We did contact the Thessaloniki Registry Office, however they declined our request for an interview. Another solution would be for social services to conduct rigorous checks at Maternity Clinics. The Ippokrateio 14 General Hospital of Thessaloniki, where many women from Bulgaria give birth, declined our request for an interview. The Greek government has announced that changes are to be made to the Adoption law; however the Deputy Minister for Labour holds the cards on private adoption very close to her chest. Photograph: Maksuda Camp in Varna, Bulgaria. During the course of our investigation, we were often confronted with the opinion that these children are better off in Greece.

This “charitable” opinion may be one of the reasons leading to the perpetuation of criminal negligence on behalf of the Greek state. Registry office officials aren’t doing their jobs. The Authorities have their hands tied. The judges have their hands tied. Lawmakers in their attempt to resolve the important issue of delays in the Adoption procedure may have created an even bigger problem. And at the end of the day, adoptive parents, desperate to have a child, finance child trafficking networks with huge sums of money. Their reasoning? “Why shouldn’t I help a child born into such poverty?” The answer seems simple: “Because you are sponsoring crimes against minors and their mothers”.

In late November 2016 the Deputy Minister for Labour, Theano Fotiou, proposed a bill to accelerate the adoption procedure in Greece. “The draft law is intended to expedite the adoption process, it will create irrefutable criteria, it will set out time constrained procedures. Adoption documentation will be completed in three months. Couples wishing to adopt should not be left in a never ending queue for years”, she declared to the media. Our sources reveal that discussions on reviewing the law on private adoptions are also taking place. The Deputy Minister of Labour declined our repeated requests for an interview on whether the law on private adoptions would be abolished.

The documentary “Children for Sale” was broadcasted on the VICE SPECIALS program on ΑΝΤ1, which airs every Saturday after midnight.

Dark Money: London’s Dirty Secret

One Monday in March last year, an announcement by the US justice department caught the attention of a former employee of the Swiss bank BSI. BSI’s bosses had agreed to violate the first rule of Swiss banking. To escape prosecution for abetting tax evasion, the bank would disclose the names of its clients and reveal the tricks it had used to hide their wealth.

The former BSI employee, who asks to be referred to only as Andrea, had worked in the bank’s UK office on Cheapside in the heart of the City of London. In 2008, Andrea was among the industry insiders who were starting to worry about London’s role as a global hub for illicit finance. That September, Andrea had warned the UK’s financial watchdogs that BSI bankers were using secretive techniques that could allow clients to conceal assets, potentially facilitating tax evasion and money laundering. The regulators took no public action against the bank and, as far as Andrea knew, no private action either.

Andrea had been spurred to contact the City’s regulators by a US Senate inquiry into tax evasion. Drawing on the testimony of a whistleblower from UBS, the biggest Swiss bank, the inquiry had exposed some of the chicanery that Swiss bankers used to help their clients hide money. A criminal investigation followed and in 2009 UBS paid a $780m fine to avoid prosecution for complicity in tax evasion. From there, the prosecutors’ campaign widened dramatically. Credit Suisse, UBS’s main rival, pleaded guilty to conspiring to help Americans evade tax and paid a $2.6bn fine. The onslaught brought down Wegelin, the oldest Swiss bank, which closed its doors in 2013 after 272 years in business. Its final act was to plead guilty to US charges of tax fraud.

In the wake of Wegelin’s demise, the US justice department launched a scheme that encouraged Swiss banks to make a clean breast of their complicity in tax evasion. In exchange, the US would forgo criminal charges. Dozens of banks applied. At the time, BSI’s owners were trying to close a deal to sell the bank. They knew they would only be able to do so once it had settled with the US. So BSI became the first Swiss bank to come to terms under the new scheme. The bank agreed to pay a fine of $211m, nearly three times its 2013 net profit. It also consented to hand over the account details of clients who should have been paying US tax, to make a “complete disclosure” of its cross-border banking activities, and to inform US prosecutors about any other banks that it knew had moved money into secret accounts.

The settlement documents laid out some of the techniques BSI had used. They closely resembled those described in Andrea’s tip-off to the Financial Services Authority, the City watchdog, and HM Revenue & Customs, the UK’s tax authority.

BSI bankers, the US settlement documents revealed, had registered client accounts to “sham entities”. These were essentially front companies, registered in places such as the British Virgin Islands and Liechtenstein. They used a series of legal manoeuvres to conceal the fact that their true owners were the bank’s American clients. When clients wanted to shift money back into the US, BSI bankers used a variety of subterfuges. In one, the bank would issue clients with prepaid debit cards loaded up with money from their Swiss account. The client’s name did not appear on the card. That left clients free to spend without leaving clues for the taxman. When clients needed BSI to top up the cards, they sent word in code. “Could you download some tunes for us?” asked one. Another winked, “Gas tank still running on empty.”

It was crucial to avoid a paper trail that might allow the authorities to spot a connection between a US taxpayer and a secret account. For an extra quarterly fee, the bank would refer to clients only by a code name on all documents relating to their Swiss accounts. More than a third of the bank’s American clients — there were 3,500 in total, with $2.8bn in declared and undeclared accounts — used this service. Two-thirds gave “hold mail” instructions, meaning that nothing should be sent by post to the client’s home address. If necessary, BSI bankers would fly from Switzerland to the US to hand-deliver account documents.

Announcing BSI’s settlement, Stuart F Delery, then number three at the justice department in Washington, called the initiative to settle with Swiss banks “an innovative effort to get the financial institutions that facilitated a massive fraud on the American tax system to come forward with information about their wrongdoing — and to ensure that they are held responsible for it”.

In an age of austerity, protesters had railed aqainst financial structures that they believed kept the rich wealthy at the expense of other taxpayers. Now here was what might have felt to them like a counterpunch against “the 1 per cent”. It was as if Thomas Piketty, the economist whose book on inequality had been a runaway bestseller, was meting out justice.

For Andrea, the contrast between the American and British responses to BSI’s activities was striking. A 2002 UK statute obliges anyone who suspects they are witnessing transactions involving the proceeds of crime to notify the authorities, even if they have no hard evidence of wrongdoing. That is what Andrea had done in 2008 — and received assurances from the watchdogs that they were on the case. “Rest assured,” wrote one investigator, “we are taking your information seriously and will use this as the basis for further investigation.” Andrea handed over internal BSI documents to them and sent emails expanding on the initial warnings.

Andrea left BSI shortly after first contacting the regulators but continued to press them to act. Over the months and years that followed, however, Andrea came to the conclusion that the City’s watchdogs were not going to bite. It seemed to Andrea that they were content to turn a blind eye to conduct that their American counterparts considered to be serious crime in the US.

Founded in 1873 in the lakeside Alpine city of Lugano as Banca della Svizzera Italiana, BSI ranks among the top 10 Swiss banks. It manages $80bn for some 125,000 clients. It has 2,000 staff and 400 “relationship managers” in offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. On its website, BSI says it seeks to be “vitally important” to its clients. Until 2008, scores of those clients, including Russian oligarchs and an Arab prince as well as Britons, dealt with the bank’s London office. Internal documents from that office, seen by the Financial Times, reveal details of the financial secrecy services that were on offer, just 300 metres from the Bank of England, to the rich, the powerful and, possibly, the criminal.

Many clandestine financial structures are legal to create but, in unscrupulous hands, they can be tools for all manner of financial misdeeds, from bribery to tax fraud. A succession of scandals has raised awareness of the ways in which the western banking system has assisted the world’s kleptocrats and tax dodgers. International reforms to force greater transparency on the most secretive offshore centres are gathering support. After last month’s Panama Papers leak, David Cameron felt first-hand the public anger about hidden financial dealings as his own family’s offshore interests were exposed. On Thursday, the prime minister will seek to burnish his legacy by advancing the transparency campaign as the host of an anti-corruption summit in London.

Cameron has spoken out in the past about tackling abuses of the financial system. In a speech last year, he declared: “I’m determined that the UK must not become a safe haven for corrupt money from around the world.”

But those whose job it is to fight corruption raise a troubling question: what if that is precisely what has already happened?

By the time they graduated from the economics department of Essex university in 2000, Khofiz Shakhidi and Abdumalik Mirakhmedov had already dabbled in business together. They served as directors of a shortlived venture called Newman Solutions Ltd. It is not clear from corporate filings what this company did and it was struck off as defunct in 2001. But the pair, both of whom appear to be of central Asian origin, were destined for bigger things. Over the years that followed, Shakhidi and Mirakhmedov would travel the world, mingle with magnates — and have ringside seats at a scandal that would shake the City. Slim and ambitious, Shakhidi took a job in 2002 as a private banker at BSI’s London office. Mirakhmedov, close-cropped and serious-looking, found employment closer to his roots. In 2000, he signed up to work for three central Asian businessmen who had made billions by snapping up chunks of resource-rich Kazakhstan’s economy as communism collapsed in the 1990s. They were laying the foundations for a multinational mining company called Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC). Mirakhmedov was assigned to the ferro-alloys division.

Shakhidi and Mirakhmedov’s paths remained entwined after leaving Essex. Mirakhmedov’s day job may have been at ENRC but he was also, the BSI documents reveal, under contract to the bank. He and his old classmate formed a sort of double act.

In 2002, Mirakhmedov joined BSI London’s roster of promoters. And he was not just any old promoter. Mirakhmedov was a star. “He’s a friend of everybody, a fixer,” says a person familiar with BSI’s London operation.

Mirakhmedov used an address in Uzbekistan and, at some point, acquired a passport from St Kitts and Nevis, Caribbean islands that sell citizenship to wealthy foreigners (a practice the US describes as “attractive to illicit actors”). Evidently, Mirakhmedov enjoyed access to the global class of what bankers call “high-net-worth individuals”. He brought in at least 19 clients with $47m in assets, making him one of BSI London’s most valuable promoters, according to internal documents.

By 2006, Mirakhmedov had earned a raise. Under a new contract, he would receive 35 per cent of the income on client accounts he brought in for BSI, rising on a scale until, for client assets of more than $500m, bank and promoter would split the takings 50/50.

And there was a sweetener in the contract, one that indicates that BSI preferred to use a promoter even when it had already identified the new clients it wanted. According to the contract, Mirakhmedov would automatically receive a 50 per cent share of revenues if he signed up any of four named Russians, two of whom ranked among the wealthiest tycoons in Vladimir Putin’s Moscow. (At least one appears to have become a BSI client, with a Swiss account held via a Guernsey trust.)

Sometimes working in tandem with Mirakhmedov, sometimes on his own, Shakhidi demonstrated a talent for courting clients from the former Soviet Union. By 2006, he had his sights on some new, heavyweight targets — Mirakhmedov’s employers. That September, Shakhidi boarded a KLM flight for Almaty, the Kazakh metropolis framed by snow-topped mountains. On arriving, he checked in to the luxury Hyatt hotel and prepared to attend a high-society wedding. The 24-year-old groom was called Davran Ibragimov; his father, Alijan, was Shakhidi’s target.

Alijan Ibragimov was one of the three oligarch founders of ENRC. The trio, as they were known, were riding high. Prices for the commodities that ENRC mined were booming. In 2006 it reported revenues of $3.3bn.

BSI emails show Shakhidi was confident that a plan to list ENRC’s shares on the London Stock Exchange the following year would prove a spectacular success. He believed that winning Ibragimov as a client and securing other business connected to ENRC could bring in at least $85m of assets for the bank. But his bosses were nervous.

BSI had taken on lots of clients from Russia and other post-Soviet states where the mixture of politics and business tainted many a fortune. It had already managed accounts for members of Ibragimov’s family, partly thanks to an introduction from Mirakhmedov, but had closed them in 2004. A background check by a British business intelligence firm in 2003 had warned about suspicions of money laundering in relation to Ibragimov. (Similar allegations against the trio by Belgian prosecutors would be settled in 2011 with the payment of a fine and no admission of guilt.)

The private investigators reassured BSI that “our contacts advise that [Ibragimov] should not be seen as worse than any other” leading businessman in the region. Nonetheless, around the start of 2006, when Shakhidi tried to get BSI’s Lugano headquarters to approve Ibragimov as a client, the bosses had deemed it too risky. Shakhidi was not deterred. In emails, he repeatedly urged them to change their minds. Following ENRC’s London listing in December 2007, he appears to have convinced them to accept funds linked to the trio.

The internal BSI documents do not confirm that the bank signed up Alijan Ibragimov himself. But they reveal that BSI’s London office gave a work placement to another of his sons in May 2008. The documents also indicate that BSI won business from other relatives of the ENRC trio. And they show that BSI’s UK unit handled offshore vehicles for Mehmet Dalman, a Cyprus-born investment banker who became a non-executive director of ENRC when it listed in 2007 and chairman in 2012.Ibragimov and Dalman did not respond to questions from the FT.

ENRC’s London flotation propelled the company into the FTSE 100. But the trio’s triumph soon soured. Their tussles for control of the company with the directors appointed following the listing triggered messy boardroom battles. Investors lost heavily as the shares tumbled. Some, including City analysts and business professors, took the admission of ENRC and other contentious companies to the British bourse as a sign that London was letting its standards slip in its eagerness to win business from fast-growing emerging markets.

Worse was to follow. In 2013, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office announced a criminal investigation into allegations of fraud, bribery and corruption at ENRC. The company denied any wrongdoing — and departed London. The trio, along with the Kazakh government, took ENRC private again, buying back shares at half the price at which they had listed six years earlier.

The criminal investigation is still ongoing. It relates in part to ENRC’s acquisition of African mining assets following its London listing. Those deals have attracted attention — including from a panel led by former UN chief Kofi Annan — to a series of secretive offshore transactions through which ENRC bought Congolese copper rights from Dan Gertler, an Israeli mining tycoon close to the country’s president. Gertler has denied any wrongdoing.

There is nothing in the BSI files to show that the bank played a part in any alleged wrongdoing at ENRC. But they do offer a glimpse into an opaque financial world linked to the company — a glimpse that the UK authorities might have gained had they followed Andrea’s tip in 2008.

Between 2000, when BSI signed up Mirakhmedov as a promoter, and 2008, when the leaked documents end, the files show that the bank helped him construct and maintain an offshore network wrapped in layer upon layer of secrecy. During this period, Mirakhmedov was rising through ENRC’s ranks. He spoke for the company at conferences, dressed in a pinstriped suit.

Files from BSI’s London office show that Mirakhmedov was linked to at least three offshore companies. One of them changed names, from Mayfair Solutions Ltd to Private Equity Group Ltd, while maintaining its registration in the British Virgin Islands, a favoured destination for those seeking to disguise their ownership of companies. Wealth Management Group Ltd, the vehicle through which Mirakhmedov signed his 2006 promoter agreement with BSI, was registered to a post-office box at an address used by multiple companies in Belize.

Shell companies behind shell companies, as well as nominee directors provided by law firms, added more disguise to Mirakhmedov’s holdings. For him as for other clients, BSI turned to a Panamanian law firm to supply the nuts and bolts of secrecy. Not Mossack Fonseca, whose files formed the vast Panama Papers leak of the past month, but another leading firm in the former Spanish colony, Alemán, Cordero, Galindo & Lee.

In one typical example, Alemán lawyers conducted a series of five interrelated transactions in a single day. First, they incorporated a new company in the British Virgin Islands, where corporate records are closely guarded. Next, they appointed Alemán agents as directors. Those directors arranged for the BVI company to issue 50,000 shares and transferred them to a company in Panama controlled by Alemán. That Panama company then signed declarations that it held those shares on behalf of Mirakhmedov and an associate. Finally, the BVI company granted the two men power of attorney over its affairs. By the end of the day, Mirakhmedov enjoyed control of an offshore company in which his interest was visible only to those privy to the law firm’s confidential files. Alemán did not respond to questions about its work for BSI clients.

In 2008, another BVI company linked to Mirakhmedov signed a confidential deal under which it would receive $150,000 a year from a company in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific as consultancy fees for an unspecified “project”. The Mirakhmedov company signed with a BSI address in Switzerland; the Marshall Islands company provided a Latvian account number at the Ukrainian-owned Privat Bank, an institution that would years later become notorious for its alleged role in one of eastern Europe’s biggest money laundering scandals. The two-page agreement does not name a single person.

Mirakhmedov’s relationship with BSI appears to have continued beyond 2008, when the documents end. They indicate he was among the promoters the bank was keen to retain. By 2013 he had been elevated to ENRC’s executive committee, in charge of sales, marketing and logistics. He stepped down in 2015, reportedly moving to another company owned by the trio.

Although the documents do not show Mirakhmedov as having done anything illegal, they invite questions about why City bankers and their clients feel the need to add so many opaque veneers to their activities.

Eurasian Resources Group, the successor company to ENRC, did not respond to questions from the FT, including ones about whether ENRC made use of any of Mirakhmedov’s offshore companies. It did not respond to a request to pass questions to him and the FT was unable to reach him directly. Attempts to obtain comment from Shakhidi were unsuccessful.

The BSI files provide an insight into a phenomenon that was widespread before 2008 but has only begun to stir public outrage in the years since the financial crisis: very large amounts of money moving around the world incognito.

Clients of BSI’s London office took advantage of services that could hide their identities. They asked for “hold mail” secrecy, the technique that avoids a paper trail. Many London clients, the documents show, also had American Express or Barclays credit cards linked to an offshore company, some with credit limits in six figures.

Experts on financial secrecy tend to agree that the key to understanding whether such secretive services are likely to be used for nefarious purposes is this: how much did the bank know about the client and the source of his or her funds?

Client lists for BSI’s London office are peppered with names that might have been expected to cause concern. They include those of a construction magnate from the Balkans implicated in an alleged kickback scheme tied to Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin and an art-dealing Qatari royal described as a “modern-day Medici”, who faced corruption allegations (though only after his BSI account was closed in 2004).

One London-based BSI banker ran an account (via Zurich and Gibraltar) for a Russian-Ukrainian businessman. A 2002 due diligence report on the client informed the bank that, while there was no further information linking the client to “criminal activities or associations”, he had a known connection to the St Petersburg mafia. A handwritten note in the margin, apparently penned by a BSI banker, dismisses the “tenuous link” as “not relevant”.

By definition, we do not know how much money passes through the hidden conduits of the global financial system. Gabriel Zucman, a French economist who studied under Piketty, estimated last year in his book The Hidden Wealth of Nations that tax havens hold $7.6tn, equivalent to the entire US budget for two years. While the vast leak of confidential documents from Panama has reinforced the notion that such outposts are the core of the secrecy industry, some experts argue that the real capitals of clandestine finance are in much less exotic places.

Britain’s private bankers manage $1.65tn of client assets, according to the professional services firm Deloitte, the biggest tally after Switzerland. That is enough money to buy Apple three times over. The City is intimately connected to British Crown dependencies and overseas territories such as Guernsey and the Virgin Islands that supply front companies, anonymous trusts and other types of financial camouflage.

“If you lump them all together,” says Alex Cobham, head of research at the Tax Justice Network campaign group, “the British secrecy network is the biggest in the world.” The National Crime Agency estimated in a report last year that “hundreds of billions of US dollars of criminal money almost certainly continue to be laundered through UK banks, including their subsidiaries, each year”.

Defenders of offshore secrecy argue that it can have legitimate purposes, such as, say, allowing a politically active businesswoman in Belarus or Egypt or Venezuela to ensure that, even if the authorities come for her, they will not be able to track down the funds she has hidden away to provide for her family.

But Andrea, for one, struggled to think of legitimate reasons why clients of BSI’s UK unit went to such trouble to shroud their banking affairs in secrecy. Even before Andrea contacted the British regulators, BSI had attracted the authorities’ attention. Between 2003 and 2005, the FSA reviewed the private banking operations of the bank’s London office. According to a person with knowledge of that investigation, a 10-strong team from the regulator pored over the bank’s client records. The investigation ended with no public sanction, but the bank was ordered to improve its procedures for screening clients from “high-risk jurisdictions”, a term used to refer to countries where corruption is rife.

By the time of Andrea’s disclosures to the City’s watchdogs in September 2008, BSI’s London office was in its final weeks, the internal documents show. The bank had already moved all client money held in the UK to Swiss accounts. Then, Generali, the Italian insurer that owned BSI at the time, decided to end the bank’s formal presence in London altogether (though it retained its own UK office).

BSI did not, however, sever relations with the clients it had served from London. On the contrary, bankers in the London office wrote to clients and promoters telling them that their relationship with the bank as a whole would not be affected. Shakhidi and some of his colleagues in London moved to BSI’s Monaco office. Others from BSI London went to Dubai or took redundancy.

Perhaps the reason any investigation into BSI stemming from Andrea’s warning came to nothing was that the regulators deemed that the bank had done nothing wrong.

“We do not comment on our interactions with the authorities,” BSI told the FT in answer to questions about whether the regulators had contacted the bank following Andrea’s warnings. “But we can confirm that BSI is strongly committed in [anti-money laundering] controls and co-operates with the authorities if and when requested.”

The FT also asked the bank about the ENRC trio and its relationship with politically connected clients, about Mirakhmedov’s offshore vehicles and about other secrecy services that BSI provided. The bank responded that “it is not our practice to give such details” and that BSI was “prohibited by [Swiss] law” from commenting on whether or not a particular person or entity is a client.

The FT sent questions to the Financial Conduct Authority (the FSA’s successor) and HMRC about their promises to Andrea to investigate BSI’s activities in London.

The City watchdog said: “The FCA, and previously the FSA, cannot confirm or deny any investigation. We are also prevented [from] commenting on any specific firm issues or any dealings we may or may not have had with individual employees.”

The tax authority said it received 86,000 leads last year, adding: “HMRC do not comment on individual taxpayers. We receive information from a very wide range of sources and we always use this information to identify abuse and intervene to ensure the tax laws are respected and that everyone pays what they owe.”

Concerned that the regulators were not going to act, in July 2014 and twice thereafter Andrea wrote to Margaret Hodge, who then chaired parliament’s public accounts committee. Hodge had used the committee to vent public anger over tax dodging. In one memorable exchange, she roasted tax officials after only a single prosecution resulted from the revelation that thousands of Britons had held undisclosed accounts at HSBC’s Swiss bank. But Andrea’s correspondence was overlooked in the hectic final months of Hodge’s tenure, which ended at last year’s election. Hodge says she regrets a missed opportunity.

One person familiar with BSI’s operations (who, like many of the bank’s clients, insisted on anonymity) says Swiss banks have been unfairly singled out for criticism. He points out that the US state of Delaware allows the incorporation of vast numbers of companies whose true owners are hidden. “The real problem in the City of London”, he contends, “is not Swiss banks but the US and UK ones.”

Asked about some of the details in the BSI files, this person says the bank’s checks on prospective clients’ probity were “stringent”. He says practices such as hold mail were standard across private banking in the years that BSI maintained its London office. “Most banks in the City of London had oligarchs and PEPs [politically exposed persons] amongst their clients, including major UK banks. Things have changed since, and certain practices which were allowed at the time have been criticised and as a result discouraged. However, law does not apply retroactively.”

Some critics perceive a cynical rationale to the British authorities’ apparent reluctance to counter flows of dirty money into the UK. They are, after all, precisely that — flows of money into the UK.

The US went after the financial secrecy provided by BSI and others because they were directly depriving the American treasury of revenue. But if the BSI files and other leaks are any guide, many of the customers for secrecy services offered in the City are not British. So if those clients are evading taxes, they are defrauding not the British exchequer but the treasuries of Ukraine or Nigeria or Pakistan. Likewise, laundered money might be blamed for making property unaffordable, but it is also boosting the assets of affluent voters. Russian fortunes might be linked back to Putin’s circle, but they bring some fine footballers to the Premier League. All of which leaves those who study illicit finance wondering whether the UK really wants to clean up the City.

“The concern is that the UK is a black hole,” says a British barrister who specialises in money laundering and tax evasion. Roberto Saviano, a best-selling author on organised crime, has said of illicit financial flows through the UK: “The British treat it as not their problem because there aren’t corpses on the street.”

In the 14 months since it settled with the US, BSI has changed hands twice. First, as soon as the bank had reached its settlement, Generali sold it for SFr1.25bn (£900m) to Brazil’s BTG Pactual. Then, last November, BTG suffered a crisis when its boss, André Esteves, stepped down to fight charges that he tried to obstruct the investigation into a corruption scandal that has convulsed Brazil. BTG sought to sell assets and, in February, EFG International, which has its headquarters in Zurich and wealth management units from Singapore to the Cayman Islands to Mayfair, agreed to buy BSI for SFr1.3bn. If completed, the deal will create one of the biggest Swiss private banks, managing $170bn.

EFG, BTG and Generali — none of which answered questions from the FT — are already grappling over who is responsible for liabilities arising from BSI’s past conduct. An investigation into allegations of corruption connected to the Malaysian state investment fund 1MDB has revealed that BSI’s Singapore unit handled accounts related to the fund. Yeo Jiawei, a former banker from that unit, was last month charged with money-laundering offences in Singapore. The bank has not been accused of wrongdoing but its past and present owners have each argued that one of the others should be on the hook if there are fines to be paid.

Some 80 Swiss banks ended up following BSI’s lead and striking deals with the US. That, alongside international agreements to share tax information and moves to combat the use of shell companies, has prompted suggestions that a new era of transparency is at hand. But clandestine finance has been challenged before — and it has evolved. Nearly eight years after warning that the City’s integrity was at risk, Andrea, now retired, has little time for suggestions that secrecy is on the way out. “That is to ignore the lessons of history.”