Real estate and lawyers play an outsized role—a familiar playbook.
The Canadian government's claims that Canada has a "robust and comprehensive anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing regime" are "simply not credible."
In Canada, "relatively simple strategies like [using lawyers and real estate] probably work as well today as they did 20 years ago... From a launderer's point of view, why try harder when old strategies still work perfectly well?"
"Though records are now somewhat dated, up to 2012 Canada had never repatriated any proceeds of foreign corruption."
One bit of good news out of Canada:
"Given Canada's de-criminalization of marijuana, it has perhaps reduced money laundering more than any other country on Earth over the last few years.... It is surprising that analyses of money laundering overlook this fairly obvious point."
"A rough rule of thumb is that countries probably host illegal wealth in proportion to the size of their financial sectors. As such, the most criminal money, both domestic and foreign, is probably held in the United States"
And in Australia:
"The Australian federal government has chosen to turn a blind eye to these illicit inflows [despite] extensive surveillance and confiscation powers possessed by law enforcement"
One last highlight, on unexplained wealth orders:
—Ireland's used UWOs since the mid-1990s (generally successfully!)
—Australia's had UWOs federally for over a decade, yet they've "never been used" (still waiting on the "perfect" money laundering case, which will never come)
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One of the (many) things we discuss on the klepto reputation-laundering front in this week's episode: universities.
Specifically, how kleptos have turned to Western universities to whitewash their reputation, impact future scholars, and gain access to Western policy-makers.
On the topic of oligarchs, kleptocrats, and the like using American and British universities to launder their reputations, can't recommend enough this paper:
The Lincoln administration implemented a policy of “pure Jacksonian removal” of the Dakota from Minnesota, “a dispossession that went far beyond a ‘relocation’”:
Thomas Jefferson proposed an ‘“Indian Amendment’ by way of an idea he called ‘removal,’ the wholesale transfer of tribes from their eastern lands to the West”
Plenty to disagree with in this piece—NATO is a clear net-benefit for all members, NATO’s bordered Russia since 1991, etc—but there should absolutely be more discussion on NATO policy in the US. nytimes.com/2021/06/14/opi…
A lack of NATO expansion obviously wouldn’t have prevented the rise of a kleptocratic dictatorship in Russia (see: the exact same dynamics in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, etc etc).
This might be the giddiest podcast episode @NateSibley, @apmassaro3 and I ever record—not least because the last few weeks have been what many counter-klepto folks have long been waiting for.
But seriously: Been an incredible few weeks on the fight against financial secrecy and trans-national corruption. Thousands of issues remain—not least implementation—but the tide feels like it's finally, maybe, perhaps turning.
And much of it driven by the U.S.!
'One profitable sphere might be to fund some academics to research a more accurate assessment of the cost of corruption to the world economy, so we can find out whether it truly is between 2-5% percent of GDP.' codastory.com/newsletters/ol…