In the winter of 2008, more than US$52 million poured through the bank accounts of two ghost companies based in Moldova. These companies were conduits for money that a ring of Russian state officials and organized crime figures stole through a complex tax fraud scheme.

 The fraud was exposed by Russian lawyer Sergey Magnitski who was working for Hermitage Capital, an American owned company that was unknowingly used by the ring.  However, Russian officials instead jailed Magnitsky and he died from mistreatment in a Russian prison. The case has led to an acrimonious dispute among the governments of Russia, the United States and several European Union countries.

The Organized Crime and Corrupting Reporting Project (OCCRP) has found that more than one-fifth of the money was channelled by two companies, Bunicon-Impex SRL and Elenast-Com SRL -- to beneficiaries through a maze of companies stretching from Russia's far east to Cyprus.

The OCCRP investigation is at the heart of official inquiries in the Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Estonia and Switzerland. Swiss authorities froze bank accounts associated with some of the persons and companies mentioned in our reporting.

Now OCCRP reporters have found new evidence that the fraud Magnitsky uncovered was part of a larger money laundering operation that involved Moldovan ghost companies, Swiss bank accounts and a labyrinth of offshore companies.

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