It's not just price (and passport) that makes the U.S. "golden visa" program so appealing for kleptocrats.
Kleptocrats can provide whatever information they want about the source of their money, knowing they'll rarely, if ever, be turned down by American authorities.
A recent study from @Transparency_ru showed just how easy it is to land an American "golden visa"—and how willing U.S. lawyers are to help suspect figures work around even the barest requirements.
Another proposed bipartisan reform: create a database of all those *denied* American "golden visas," and push allies to share identities of others denied.
As @Malinowski said: "American citizenship should not be for sale."
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?"
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).