Tag Archives | money laundering

UK company transparency: one less place to hide

It’s finally happened. UK legislation requiring the true owners of UK companies to be made public, received the final sign off in Parliament last week. Under the new law, UK-registered companies must submit information on their true owners – such as full name and nationality – to Companies House which up until now has not […]

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Major economies move on money laundering, but what about the Cayman Islands?

The final two months of 2014 saw a surge of positive news for civil society whose collaborative and consolidated efforts over recent years to push for greater corporate transparency measures are now seeing the light.

Civil society has called for greater light to be shed on the real living people who ultimately own or control companies – the beneficial owners. Current levels of secrecy mean that global detection rates for illicit funds by law enforcement are as low as 1 percent for criminal proceeds.

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No impunity: the law steps in to investigate

It’s getting harder for Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue to keep getting away with it. The son of the long-serving president of Equatorial Guinea has been forced by the US government to forfeit his cliff-top Malibu mansion, a rare Ferrari and several life-size Michael Jackson statues, all said by the US Department of Justice to have […]

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El lavado de dinero: un tema clave que no puede dejarse sólo a los expertos

A partir de mañana (Oct. 22) un grupo de representantes de gobiernos y expertos que pertenecen al Grupo de Acción Financiera (GAFI) – la Organización líder en materia de políticas contra el lavado de dinero a nivel global – se encontrará en París. La agenda  incluye la adopción de un documento sobre un tema de […]

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Money-laundering: too important to leave to the experts alone

Starting tomorrow a group of government officials and experts belonging to the world’s leading anti-money laundering organisation – the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) – will be meeting in Paris. On the agenda is the adoption of a document on an issue that has major implications for the fight against crime, corruption and tax evasion […]

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Piketty: Diagnosing inequality and prescribing a dose of anti-corruption

It’s the blockbuster policy book of the year: Thomas Piketty’s weighty Capital in the 21st Century, a 600 plus-page analysis of the scale and perils of rising inequality. As Piketty argues, wealth and return on capital are growing faster than the overall economy and income from labour. Making matters worse, labour income is becoming increasingly […]

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G20 anti-corruption meeting: progress, but without ambition

The G20 is making progress in the fight against corruption. However for all the talk, the representatives of the world’s leading economies are not setting the bar high enough. From our point of view, unless the G20 mandates and enforces greater corporate transparency, corrupt public officials, gangsters, drug dealers and terrorists will continue to misuse […]

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Public consultation in Jersey: chance to come clean

The use of shell companies to mask the true owners of assets is still on top of the political agenda and interest in the issue continues to grow. This week the UK government announced further details of its plan to implement a public registry of company ownership. This is important because shell companies can facilitate […]

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Shelving the shells

From one corruption fighting organisation to another, hats off to Global Witness. Founder Charmian Gooch and her colleagues have been recognised for their stellar efforts to highlight the damage done by corrupt practices in the extractives sector. In her award winning TED talk, Gooch highlighted the role of ‘the facilitators’ – global banks and global […]

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Russian money: too big to sanction?

As the Crimea crisis has developed, there have been calls to freeze Russian and Ukrainian assets in the UK. Russian money is unusual for two reasons. First, the sheer volume. Secondly, because there have been persistent allegations that a substantial proportion of it is dirty money – gained through organised crime and corruption in a […]

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