A Syrian Arab Airlines Airbus A340-312 at Damascus International Airport on 1 October 2020. Photo: EPA-EFE/YOUSSEF BADAWIA
Deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad dispatched 21 planes to Moscow carrying around $250 million in cash over two years in an attempt to circumvent Western sanctions on his regime over the Syrian Civil War, The Financial Times (FT) reported on Sunday.
According to the FT, despite the regime being “desperately short of foreign currency”, Syria’s Central Bank flew almost two tonnes of $100 and €500 notes from Damascus to Moscow between 2018 and 2019 as Assad sought to safeguard his family’s fortune.
The cash was then deposited in Russian Financial Corporation Bank (RFK), a Moscow financial institution controlled by Russian state arms export company Rosoboronexport that was placed under US sanctions in March for facilitating “millions of dollars of illicit transactions, foreign currency transfers and sanctions evasion schemes for the benefit of the Syrian government”.
The shipments came at a time when the Assad regime was becoming increasingly dependent on Russian military support to crush armed opposition to its rule, and while the dictator’s family was engaged in a “buying spree of luxury properties” in Moscow, the FT said.
In 2019, the FT reported that Assad’s extended family had used a “complex series of companies and loan arrangements” to purchase at least 20 luxury apartments in the Russian capital since 2013.
US diplomat David Schenker, who served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs between 2019 and 2021, said that Assad had been aware that were his rule to end, “it was going to end badly”, and so his regime regularly moved money out of Syria to secure “their ill-gotten gains” as well as to “procure the fine life … for the regime and its inner circle”.
On Sunday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry announced that it had partially evacuated its diplomatic personnel from Damascus alongside diplomats from Kremlin allies Belarus, North Korea and the breakaway Georgian republic of Abkhazia.
The FT also reported on Sunday that Russia had pulled over 400 of its troops out of the Syrian capital to its Hmeimim air base on the country’s Mediterranean coast and that discussions with Syria’s transitional government about withdrawing more Russian troops were “ongoing” amid uncertainty over the Kremlin’s continued military presence in the country.
