Capital outflow for the initial half-year is estimated at nine to ten billion US dollars, slightly below entire last year's, she added.
As the Finance Ministry was forecasting, last spring, a capital inflow promised to replace an outflow for a first time within recent years. That never came true. Expects blame the Federal Reserve System changing its rates, and a controversy round the Yukos petroleum mammoth, which fiscal offices are suing for back taxes of several billion dollars.
Recent terror acts in Russia came in, too, to make capital investors apprehensive. "Their trust in Russia was shattered to cause a capital outflow and so a banking crisis," said Ms. Monegen.
She does not think there is any way to stop the outflow unless this country spectacularly improves its investment climate, and guarantees banking stability and human safety.
The massive outflow badly hampers laundered money monitoring, she emphatically added.
As he took the floor, in his turn, Terry Kinney, permanent US Department of Justice representative to Russia, said the department highly appreciated official Russian efforts to reduce capital outflow. Russia was tremendous success over quite a short time. It was recently on a black list of countries totally passive against money laundering. Now, it has every opportunity to fight the evil, he stressed.
The conference opened today on the premises of the Federation Council, parliament's upper house, with a minute of silence to commemorate the Beslan school terror act victims.
