LIFELINE STATE OF DECAY SERIES

Like the other towns in the region, youвЂ™ve likely never heard of it - and like other towns in the region, HarvardвЂ™s best days are decades behind it. With a population of just under 10,000, Harvard, Ill., is a speck of a town equidistant between Chicago and Milwaukee. lawmakers are only just starting to grapple with: As money-launderers and illicit financiers hide their money in the American Midwest, theyвЂ™ve become part of the story of the decline of small-town, blue-collar America. ItвЂ™s a reality of global corruption that U.S. laws around shell companies and real-estate purchases, in addition to a broader lack of regulatory oversight, may be putting AmericaвЂ™s heartland in the crosshairs of elites like Kolomoisky. The story of Harvard suggests that lax U.S. (Kolomoisky denies wrongdoing, claiming he made the investments with his own money.)

LIFELINE STATE OF DECAY SERIES

sanctions for вЂњsignificant corruptionвЂќ in Ukraine, is separately accused by the Justice Department and Ukrainian investigators of using a constellation of shell companies and offshore bank accounts to move millions in misappropriated funds out of Ukraine and into a series of real-estate investments in the American Midwest. Kolomoisky, who was recently hit with U.S. One of these small towns appears to have been Harvard, Ill., a depressed factory community that allegedly became part of a sprawling network used by Ukrainian banking tycoon Ihor Kolomoisky to launder hundreds of millions of dollars earned from a Ponzi scheme.

Many of the stories in the Pandora Papers follow a playbook that is depressingly familiar at this point: Global heads of state and business elites hide their wealth in pursuits that are emblematic of the super-rich: coveted beachside properties in Malibu, as in the case of the Jordanian monarch, or the Czech prime ministerвЂ™s $22 million chateau in the south of France, or dozens of pieces of high-value artwork, moved secretly through shell companies by one of Sri LankaвЂ™s most powerful families. The papers are a tranche of nearly 12 million documents, revealed by an international group of journalists, that describe how global elites - from the king of Jordan to Pakistani Prime Minister Imran KhanвЂ™s inner circle to an alleged mistress of Vladimir Putin - use shell companies, trusts, real estate, artwork and other financial secrecy tools to squirrel away enormous amounts of money. In recent weeks, the world has learned incredible new details about corruption, illicit financing and money laundering by the super-rich, thanks to the Pandora Papers.

Lifeline state of decay