In most countries, criminals need to make their dirty money clean in order to make it useful in the legitimate economy. As any Breaking Bad fan knows, that’s what money laundering is: a way to bring the proceeds of crime onto account books and into bank accounts as the proceeds of a legitimate business.

But in Russia, corruption has gotten so bad that the logic of money laundering has turned upside down. There, many companies face the opposite problem: In order to get things done, they need to take clean money and make it dirty.

As Joshua Yaffa reports in an excellent piece in the New Yorker, Russia's answer is a service known as "obnal," or dark money: the process by which legitimate companies take legitimate profits and launder them into off-the-books slush funds to be used for bribes and tax evasion. Though it's not a universal practice, obnal has become a billion-dollar business in Russia. One of the biggest players in the trade was a midsize institution called Master Bank, which reportedly operated at a loss in order to provide cover for its roaring trade in obnal:

http://www.vox.com/2015/7/30/9073285/putin-russia-corruption