THE KREMLIN’S STONE WALL….
Pavel Borodin, former director of the Kremlin’s property office, is in jail in Switzerland. Borodin was arrested in New York in January on a Swiss warrant and extradited to Geneva over the weekend. He is charged there with laundering $30 million in alleged kickbacks from two Swiss companies retained by the Kremlin’s property office to refurbish Kremlin buildings and perform other services. The Swiss prosecutors won’t get much cooperation from Moscow, where the prosecutor general closed his investigation of the affair last December. Without cooperation, there may not be a case. You can’t launder clean money, says Borodin’s lawyer, and where is the proof the money Borodin banked in Switzerland is dirty? After all, he says, the Russian prosecutors looked at the evidence and decided not to file charges.