Russia doesn't get the irony...

Suing one of America's oldest banks for money laundering by the nation that pioneered money laundering as a reliable income stream for a financial institution after the fall of the Soviet regime. In all honesty Russia does have a point: BoNY did allow a little faux-pas to transpire and never formally paid Russia back (or bribed their lawyers with vodka, fresh chickens and potatoes which is an offer no longer on the table I am told) when this all happened. Of course the timing is not exactly a coincidence (as nothing in Russia ever is), but I'll leave that to the readers to guess.
Also - Ms. Edwards mentions how only "some" of the customers were carrying machine guns. Those are the legitimate clients who are concerned about losing their capital en route. It's the ones who sent their deposits without an armored escort that you need to worry about - they have enough notoriety that they don't even need to guard their wealth. Nobody is stupid enough to touch it. Incidentally, how is that Lucy and Peter Berlin are still alive and in good health?

clipped from www.bloomberg.com Russia Sues Bank of New York for alleged money laundering in the 1990s. Russia's Federal Customs Service is seeking $22.5 billion in damages from the Bank of New York Co., the world's second-largest custodian of investor assets, for alleged money laundering in the 1990s. A former Bank of New York vice president based in London, Lucy Edwards, and her husband Peter Berlin, who ran companies with accounts at the bank, admitted in 2000 to conspiring to use the bank to launder more than $7 billion from Russia. more than $7 billion moved from Russia through the bank, some on behalf of ``customers with machine guns,'' Edwards said in a statement accompanying her guilty plea in February 2000. A Russian court can as much as triple the amount laundered by the Bank of New York to calculate damages incurred by the Russian Government Shares of Bank of New York fell 75 cents, or 1.8 percent,