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Money Laundering Research Related to Financial Havens Follow the Money: How Tax Havens Facilitate Dirty Money Flows and Distort Global Markets The elephant in the living room of the corruption debate is the role played by the global infrastructure of banks, legal and accounting businesses, tax havens and related financial intermediaries in providing an offshore interface between the illicit and the licit economies. This interface facilitates capital flight and tax evasion, distorts global markets to the disadvantage of innovation and entrepreneurship, slows economic growth by rewarding freeriding and mis-directing investment, and increases global inequality. The offshore interface functions through collusion between private sector financial intermediaries and the governments of states which host offshore tax haven activities. John Christensen
Tax Haven Abuses: The Enablers, the Tools and Secrecy
Money Laundering and Investments from Offshore Companies Offshore zones are among the most important elements used for money laundering purposes. Offshore zones are a part of any country with low taxes, a strict regime of bank secrecy and classified commercial information, minimal reserve requirements of a central bank, and the absence of restrictions on currency exchange. Apart from that, as a rule, offshore zones have simplified procedures for registration and licensing of juridical entities and financial companies. Paata Khotenashvili
CORRUPTION IN INTERNATIONAL BANKING AND FINANCIAL SYSTEMS Money laundering made easy. If you are a criminal, corruption in a bank takes a lot of the worry out of laundering your illicit funds. This report provides some examples of where corruption in international banking and financial systems has occurred. It will show some of the common elements of this type of activity and lessons to be learned by those interested in crime prevention, detection and prosecution. Lynne Walker
Offshore Banking: Uses and Abuses The fear and suspicion surrounding offshore banking is really only a matter of "lack of knowledge & information". Very few people, including both those who condemn it and those who promote it, really know what offshore banking or, more general, offshore finance is. Vitali Dachine and Semen Davydov
Money Laundering - Regulatory Oversight of Offshore Private Banking Activities We found in our prior work on private banking that there was no comprehensive database on the extent of private banking activities, let alone offshore private banking activities, by banks or other financial institutions operating in the United States. We also found that the most recent information identified on private banking in the United States was a general overview of the area, which did not consistently identify the providers that were engaged in international, specifically offshore, activities. Given this constraint, we attempted to identify banks that were actively involved in offshore private banking activities by first identifying banks with large amounts of assets in selected offshore jurisdictions, then determining through input from regulators if these banks were engaged in offshore private banking activities involving these jurisdictions. Our methodology is described in greater detail below. General Accounting Office
Financial Havens, Banking Secrecy and Money Laundering The major money laundering cases coming to light in recent years share a common feature: criminal organizations are making wide use of the opportunities offered by financial havens and offshore centres to launder criminal assets, thereby creating roadblocks to criminal investigations. Financial havens offer an extensive array of facilities to the foreign investor unwilling to disclose the origin of his assets, from the registration of International Business Corporations (IBCs) or shell companies, to the services of a number of “offshore banks” which are not subject to control by regulatory authorities. The difficulties for law enforcement agents are amplified by the fact that, in many cases, financial havens enforce very strict financial secrecy, effectively shielding foreign investors from investigations and prosecutions from their home country. While bank secrecy and financial havens are distinct issues, they have in common both a legitimate purpose and a commercial justification. At the same time, they can offer unlimited protection to criminals when they are abused for the purpose of “doing business at any cost”. Jack A. Blum, Esq., Prof. Michael Levi, Prof. R. Thomas Naylor and Prof. Phil Williams
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