Thread by @cjcmichel

Really is tough to overstate how massive this passing will be.

Banning anonymous shell companies in the U.S. would be the biggest anti-money laundering move the country has taken in nearly 20 years—and potentially ever.

https://twitter.com/JasonLeopold/status/1334638330705637376

There hasn’t been a single piece of anti-money laundering legislation of this magnitude since the Patriot Act, which took massive strides toward cleaning up the US banking sector from dirty money.

But even the Patriot Act’s full AML weight was gutted by “temporary” exemptions.

The fact that Trump might be the president to sign into law legislation banning anonymous shell companies is a *huge* testament to the civil society voices who built bipartisan support for it.

Long, long time in the making.

Banning anonymous shells is hardly a panacea for ending the US as a global leader in providing kleptocratic tools—anonymous real estate, trusts, and hedge funds still remain to be tackled.

But it’s a huge, huge blow to the US’s role as the world’s biggest dirty money laundromat.

(The U.S.’s transformation into the world’s biggest dirty money laundromat—and how these pro-kleptocracy industries and loopholes first developed—is the subject of my book, AMERICAN KLEPTOCRACY, due next year. Stay tuned!)

Worth singling out in particular the work that @FACTCoalition has done in getting the U.S. this close to finally banning anonymous shell companies. Civil society at its best.

https://twitter.com/ClarkGascoigne/status/1334621491955195910

'He is similarly optimistic about one of his loftiest goals: “to rally our allies to combat corruption and kleptocracy, and to hold systems of authoritarian capitalism accountable for greater transparency and participation in a rules-based system.”' politico.com/news/2020/11/2…