The Untold Story on Why Turkey is Keeping Sweden and Finland Out of NATO

Gavin M. Wax
4 min readJul 26, 2022

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A massive money-laundering scandal with devastating national security and geopolitical implications has gone unreported, showing how a globalist power like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) can be brought to heel by malign actors in its midst.

Swedish Whistleblower under U.S. asylum Victor X, born Victor Carlström, has been sounding the alarm for years about a money-laundering scandal fueled by illicit Turkish power throughout the West. He has filed a $4.2 billion lawsuit in the Southern District of New York demanding accountability from Swedbank, Folksam, and SEB, some of the largest financial institutions in Sweden, related to their corrupt dealings with the Turks.

Victor X has presented compelling evidence showing that the Swedish financial sector has laundered billions of dollars earned in the international drug trade through real estate and infrastructure investments. He is under heavy police protection to keep him safe from reprisals launched by Turkish President Recep Erdoğan’s right-hand man and former prime minister of Turkey Binali Yıldırım.

After Russia launched its ongoing Special Military Operation in the Donbas, two Western nations that had previously opted to forgo NATO membership, Sweden and Finland, elected to apply. Due to the nature of NATO’s structure, which requires unanimous agreement to admit new members, Erdoğan, a leader never afraid to assert authority on the world stage, seized the moment to tighten the screws further on Sweden.

Using the Kurds as an excuse, Erdoğan is publicly demanding Sweden extradite 73 political prisoners to face show trials in his Islamic nation, but this is untenable because the Swedish Supreme Court has already rejected extradition requests for 19 of these individuals. The rest will be individually tried in the Swedish Courts for extraditions, with political figures holding no jurisdiction over this process. Erdoğan understands the situation fully and is floating this unreasonable request as an excuse to bar Sweden from NATO.

NATO countries regularly give harbor to Kurdish refugees and have far larger Kurdish populations than Sweden. Germany boasts a population of 1.2 million to 1.5 million Kurds. France and the Netherlands have several times more Kurds than Sweden, which has a small Kurdish population of roughly 83,000.

These countries all harbor substantially more Kurds than Sweden, but Erdoğan refrains from taking a hard-line stance against any of them while focusing his ire on Sweden.

Victor X’s claims give added context to Turkey’s motives in obstructing Sweden’s NATO ambitions.

The Turkish money-laundering scheme that he has detailed spans the nation and implicates Erdogan’s right-hand man and former Turkish prime minister Binali Yıldırıms, whose family company was intimately involved in the scandal. According to his testimony, the money comes largely from drug trafficking between elites from Turkey and Venezuela.

Turkey lords over the largest drug trafficking operation in history, according to Victor X, and that claim is bolstered by exiled Turkish mafia boss Sedat Perker. Turkey uses the formal neutrality held by countries like Sweden and Finland to make them accessories to its crimes, and Russian aggression pushes these countries toward NATO, jeopardizing the status quo.

Victor X’s testimony not only exposes how Turkey’s drug money is affecting geopolitics, but also shows how Western leaders are participating in a charade when it comes to Sweden and Finland joining NATO.

Victor X worked as a bank agent, ensuring that assets were protected from connection with malign or dangerous countries like Venezuela, Russia, or Turkey. He would help his clients set up tax-advantaged bank accounts in other countries, like Luxembourg, Singapore or Dubai, and move assets between them.

Victor X did not help the rich elite hide dirty money per se, but in his role, he became an expert in opening bank accounts, setting up complex company structures, fixing the documentation, and the other steps that go into hiding money. So when Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the Department of Justice was creating a KleptoCapture task force to come after the assets of Russian oligarchs, did they come calling?

Not quite. Victor X said that nobody from the U.S. Government had contacted him regarding KleptoCapture. He believes this is either due to incompetence or because the Biden administration just wants to put in a token effort for the cameras against the Russians, similar to how NATO is being hamstrung due to the Turkish money laundering case that nobody wants to mention or touch.

Victor X has offered to meet Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson face to face in Washington, D.C., and explain this solution fully but does not expect his request to be accepted.

Political leaders need to stop lying to the world and start talking about the real issue, which is the money laundering Victor X has outlined in grave detail to American courts.

The media needs to start holding its political leaders accountable and shine light upon this money laundering scandal, rather than pushing sensationalist headlines about Russia designed to grab attention and fuel convenient narratives. Otherwise, Sweden and Finland will have no chance of ever joining NATO, and the current geopolitical crisis will continue to worsen.

Originally published at https://www.newsmax.com on July 26, 2022.

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Gavin M. Wax
Gavin M. Wax

Written by Gavin M. Wax

Gavin M. Wax is a New York-based conservative political activist, commentator, columnist, operative, and strategist. You can follow him on Twitter at @GavinWax

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