International Money Laundering Deserves More Attention

In the past, when I heard money laundering, I’d think of organized criminals taking elicit money and finding ways to secure it and make it usable. But money laundering on the international level, involving authoritarian regimes, and the oligarchs and organized criminals within those regimes finding people in liberal democratic countries to help them launder their money has a national security component as well–at least if my understanding is accurate. The people in Western countries helping these people are doing something wrong, if not illegal. This can be used as leverage against them to not only continue the money laundering, but maybe do other things to help the authoritarian regimes. This is obvious if the people assisting with money laundering have political positions, but if they have any position of influence in the society–e.g., legal, media, academic, business, technology, etc.–bad actors can use the leverage with these people to harm national security and national interests. At least that’s what it seems like to me. Anyway, I started to this thread because I couldn’t find the other threads or posts that discussed this, and I wanted to post an article on this topic. The article is from Just Security and it’s called, Global Kleptocracy as an American Problem

2 thoughts on “International Money Laundering Deserves More Attention

  1. I’m unfamiliar with the person that tweeted this, but I’m interested in checking out some of the references he posts in this thread.

  2. Biden calls for sweeping new push to expose and punish financial corruption from WaPo

    The plan, if properly backed by money and other resources, would bring badly needed reforms to industries open to exploitation, including the growing U.S. trust industry, said Ian Gary, executive director of the nonpartisan Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency (FACT) Coalition.

    “Current law encourages the U.S. trust industry to compete on the basis of providing anonymity and shirking public accountability,” he said. “This effectively weaponizes our otherwise strong rule-of-law financial systems against us, undermining our national security and our democratic institutions domestically and internationally.”

    I hope these policies are backed with the necessary resources.

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