Probation in Money-Laundering Case

NEW YORK -- A former officer at the Bank of New York and her husband were sentenced to five years’ probation Wednesday, almost six years after they admitted conspiring to use the bank to launder more than $7 billion from Russia, Bloomberg News reported.

The executive, Lucy Edwards, who was a vice president of the bank and based in London, and her husband, Peter Berlin, who ran companies with accounts at the bank, pleaded guilty in February 2000 and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors investigating money laundering, Bloomberg News reported.

“We had no right to bring the wild habits of the Russian business environment onto American soil,” Berlin told Judge Shirley Wohl Kram in federal court in Manhattan, Bloomberg News reported.

Edwards and Berlin will spend six months in home detention in New Jersey. They must make restitution of $685,000 to the Internal Revenue Service and pay fines of $20,000 each, Bloomberg News reported.

-- NYSSCPA.org News Staff

Posted on 7/27/06