The country of Cyprus has a long history as a laundromat for dirty money, particularly from Russia. Cyprus is referenced 530,937 times in the Panama Papers, and the Bank of Cyprus, the country's largest bank, is referenced 4,657 times. And the cast of characters linked to the bank and President Donald Trump is troubling.

-When Oleg Deripaska, the founder of Russian aluminum company Rusal, began paying Paul Manafort $10 million a year in 2006 to act as a secret emissary for Russian President Vladimir Putin with Western governments, he paid Manafort through the Bank of Cyprus. Records handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller's investigative team show that Manafort and his partner, Rick Gates, had at least 15 accounts at the Bank of Cyprus and a bank that it took over in 2013, Cyprus Popular Bank, according to the National Herald. Mueller's 12-count indictment against Manafort and Gates charged the two men with money laundering and conspiracy against the United States.

-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross led a group of U.S. and European investors to purchase a $1.3 billion stake in Bank of Cyprus in July 2014 when the bank was on the verge of failing. This investment bought Ross the largest ownership share in the bank, 17 percent, and the vice chairmanship. Ross was co-chair of the bank from 2014 until early 2017 when he relinquished his position to join Trump's cabinet. Ross's first co-chair was Putin appointee Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, a former KGB agent and long-time associate of Putin. In 2015, Strzhalkovsky was replaced by Maksim Goldman, is director of strategic projects at Viktor Vekselberg's Renova Group and sits on the board of Rusal.

Touch chart to see info:

-Viktor Vekselberg, one of the richest men in Russia, is the largest shareholder in the Bank of Cyprus holding a 9.3 percent stake as of early 2017, according to DCReport.org.

-Dmitry Rybolovlev, Russia's "Fertilizer King," owns a 3.3 percent stake in the bank. Rybolovlev purchased Trump's mega mansion in Palm Beach for $95 million, which allowed Trump to more than double his $41 million investment in the property in four years. The timing of the purchase was essentially a Trump rescue package Trump was suing Deutsche Bank, his one remaining creditor, to try to avoid repaying a $40 million real estate loan. He lost.

-Josef Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank from 2002 to 2012, replaced Ross as co-chair of the bank. Like co-chair Goldman, Ackermann currently works for Viktor Vekselberg. He joined the board of Vekselberg's Zurich-based holding company, Renova Management AG, in 2014 to manage Renova's international assets. Clearly, Vekselberg's interests are fully represented at the Bank of Cyprus.

Touch chart to see info:

After being blackballed by U.S. banks for failure to pay his loans, Trump turned to Deutsche Bank for liquidity. Deutsche Bank is estimated to have loaned Trump as much as $3 billion since the 1990s. Trump's financial disclosures show that he has $364 million in loans from the bank that will mature in 2024. On December 5, German newspaper Handelsblatt broke the news that Deutsche Bank received a subpoena from Robert Mueller for bank records.

During Ackermann's tenure as chief executive, Deutsche Bank engaged in a wide range of financial misconduct including, according to the New Yorker, laundering $10 billion of Russian money through its offices in New York, Cyprus and Moscow. Through November of 2017, the bank had paid over $670 million in civil penalties to the U.S. and the U.K. related to its Russian trades. Deutsche Bank's Moscow office was run by Andrey Kostin Jr. until 2011 when he died in an ATV crash in a forest in northern Russia. Kostin's father, Andrey Kostin Sr., is chief executive of VTB, the second largest state-controlled bank in Russia that is currently under U.S. sanctions. In an interview with CNBC Kostin said, "We are sick and tired of what's happening in America and this anti-Russian stance."

-The Guardian recently reported that VTB was the source of $191 million that Yuri Milner, a Russian billionaire in Silicon Valley, used to fund a major stake in Twitter in 2011 through his investment fund, DST. Milner also channeled $920 million into Facebook funded by the investment arm of Russia's state-controlled gas monopoly, Gazprom. The money was transferred from Gazprom to DST through an offshore company in the Isle of Man, Kanton Services. The investment by Gazprom funded $1 billion worth of Facebook shares.

-Gazprom's investment subsidiary is managed by Alisher Usmanov, an Uzbek-Russian billionaire with close ties to the Kremlin. Carter Page, who served as a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign and made several trips to Russia in 2016, TalkingPointsMemo.com reported, has deep financial ties to Gazprom.

Yuri Milner also invested $850,000 of his personal funds into a real estate startup, Cadre, which Jared Kushner co-owns with his brother. Kushner failed to disclose his association with Cadre when he joined the Trump White House.

Ruth May is a global business professor at the University of Dallas. She wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Email: rmay@udallas.edu

What's your view?

Got an opinion about this issue? Send a letter to the editor, and you just might get published.