Today, the State Department is announcing a reward offer under the Transnational Organized Crime Rewards Program (TOCRP) of up to $7 million for Russian national Artem Aleksandrovich Uss, for information leading to his arrest and/or conviction for conspiring to participate in or attempting to participate in transnational organized crime. This announcement follows the October 19, 2022, announcement of a 12-count criminal indictment returned by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of New York against Uss and six other co-defendants. Uss was charged with four counts: 1) conspiracy to defraud a department or agency of the United States; 2) conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA); 3) conspiracy to commit bank fraud; and 4) conspiracy to commit money laundering for the oil smuggling and IEEPA scheme.
Uss allegedly orchestrated a transnational fraud, smuggling, and money laundering operation in part through Nord-Deutsche Industrieanlagenbau GmbH (NDA GmbH), a privately held industrial equipment and commodity trading company located in Hamburg, Germany. As owners of NDA GmbH, Uss and another co-conspirator reportedly engaged in a variety of activities in violation of U.S. criminal laws and U.S. and other sanctions, including: 1) the unlawful export of millions of U.S. dollars in military and sensitive dual-use technologies from the United States to Russia; and 2) the use of the U.S. financial system to facilitate the smuggling of millions of barrels of oil from Venezuela.
