What are the criteria used by Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the European Union to blacklist jurisdictions at high-risk of money laundering? What are the countries at highest risk according to Panama Papers and FinCEN files? Where do criminals move their illicit money, according to judicial and investigative evidence? This book answers these questions. It is an unprecedented study on the countries at highest risk of attracting money laundering and organised crime proceeds – and how they are identified as such by scholars, policy-makers and anti-money laundering (AML) practitioners. It targets an issue which is central to the policy debate, in the media, but is under-studied. This book is divided into two parts. Part I discusses the concept of money laundering risk, its main determinants, and carries out a review of extant country ratings, ranging from official blacklists and grey lists, to media leaks and scholarly papers. Part II discusses the weaknesses and the myths behind the current ratings and proposes a new approach to assess the risk of money laundering across countries. With a critical research perspective, empirically driven, this book aims to satisfy both scholars and students – in particular from criminology, economics, and international relations – and practitioners from banks, professional firms, and AML authorities.

In this article, the author discusses the process and rationale behind the EU's anti-money laundering blacklist and the U.S. Treasury's response.

In The Banker's Blacklist, Julia C. Morse demonstrates how the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has enlisted global banks in the effort to keep "bad money" out of the financial system, in the process drastically altering the domestic policy landscape and transforming banking worldwide. Trillions of dollars flow across borders through the banking system every day. While bank-to-bank transfers facilitate trade and investment, they also provide opportunities for criminals and terrorists to move money around the globe. To address this vulnerability, large economies work together through an international standard-setting body, the FATF, to shift laws and regulations on combating illicit financial flows. Morse examines how this international organization has achieved such impact, arguing that it relies on the power of unofficial market enforcement—a process whereby market actors punish countries that fail to meet international standards. The FATF produces a public noncomplier list, which banks around the world use to shift resources and services away from listed countries. As banks restrict cross-border lending, the domestic banking sector in listed countries advocates strongly for new laws and regulations, ultimately leading to deep and significant compliance improvements. The Bankers' Blacklist offers lessons about the peril and power of globalized finance, revealing new insights into how some of today's most pressing international cooperation challenges might be addressed.

What are the criteria used by Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the European Union to blacklist jurisdictions at high-risk of money laundering? What are the countries at highest risk according to Panama Papers and FinCEN files? Where do criminals move their illicit money, according to judicial and investigative evidence? This book answers these questions. It is an unprecedented study on the countries at highest risk of attracting money laundering and organised crime proceeds – and how they are identified as such by scholars, policy-makers and anti-money laundering (AML) practitioners. It targets an issue which is central to the policy debate, in the media, but is under-studied. This book is divided into two parts. Part I discusses the concept of money laundering risk, its main determinants, and carries out a review of extant country ratings, ranging from official blacklists and grey lists, to media leaks and scholarly papers. Part II discusses the weaknesses and the myths behind the current ratings and proposes a new approach to assess the risk of money laundering across countries. With a critical research perspective, empirically driven, this book aims to satisfy both scholars and students – in particular from criminology, economics, and international relations – and practitioners from banks, professional firms, and AML authorities.

The paper advocates leveraging anti-money laundering (AML) measures to enhance tax compliance, tackle tax crimes, and, in turn, help mobilize domestic revenues. While AML measures have already been deployed to improve tax compliance, including during the European debt crisis, the benefits that such measures could bring to the integrity of the tax system are yet to be fully realized. In recent years, the relevance of AML measures for tax purposes resurfaced in public discourse in light of numerous data leaks that provided ample evidence of the closely intertwined nature of tax crimes and money laundering. There might now be the right political momentum for greater utilization of AML measures given post-pandemic calls for a more progressive tax system, elevated sovereign debt burdens, a challenging global economic outlook, and widespread cost-of-living crisis. In this context, the IMF has stressed the importance of rebuilding fiscal buffers, as countries with more fiscal room are better placed to weather the economic slowdown and protect households and businesses.

This book analytically reviews the impact of the global anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) framework on the compliance trajectory of a number of jurisdictions to this framework. The work begins by examining the international financial sector reform and its evolution to inculcate the global framework for AML/CFT regulations. It challenges the resulting uniform AML/CFT due to its paradoxical impact on the compliance trajectory of African countries and emerging economies (ACs/EEs). This is done through an examination of the pre-conditions for effective regulation and compliance drivers for ACs/EEs that reveals the behavioural impact of the AML/CFT standards on the bloc of countries. Through the application of agency theory, it explores the relationship between ACs/EEs on the one hand and the international financial institutions that formulate, disseminate and facilitate compliance with the global framework for AML/CFT standards on the other. The remaining chapters review empirically the compliance pressures and resulting compliance trajectory of ACs/EEs with the AML/CFT standards. The final part of the book provides a detailed explanation of the compliance challenges of ACs/EEs and the legitimacy concerns that facilitate this. This book offers a new direction on the impact of global AML/CFT standards on ACs/EEs and contributes to the understanding of the conditions under which the global standards are likely to facilitate proactive compliance within these blocs of countries. As such it will be a valuable resource for academics, researchers and policy-makers working in this area.

The study of white-collar crime remains a central concern for criminologists around the world and research concentrates on its nature, prevalence, causes and responses. However, most books on white-collar crime tend to focus on Anglo-American examples, which is surprising given the amount of rich data and research taking place in mainland Europe. This new handbook seeks to reset the balance and, for the first time, presents an overview of state-of-the-art research on white-collar crime in Europe. Adding to the existing Anglo-American body of knowledge, the Handbook will discuss specific European topics and typical European features of white-collar crime. The Routledge Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime in Europe consists of more than thirty chapters on topics ranging from the Icelandic Banking Crisis, to the origins of the study of white collar crime, to contemporary topics, such as white-collar crime in countries post-transition from communist regimes; the illegal e-waste trade and white-collar crime in professional football. Furthermore, the book contains extensive case study analyses of landmark European cases of white-collar crime. The editors have gathered together the leading voices in the field and a final section offers commentaries on white-collar crime in Europe from eminent criminologists David Friedrichs and Hazel Croall. This Handbook will thus serve as a work of reference for all scholars and students engaged in the study of corporate and white-collar crime and will also set out directions for new research in the future.

Adopting a mixed-methods approach, this book assesses the role of soft law as a technique to repress and prevent money laundering. The consequence of the combination of a non-traditional subject matter with the limitations of traditional international law instruments has meant that lawmakers seeking international solutions to the problems of money laundering have had to innovate. This book addresses two fundamental issues in the context of existing international and domestic responses to the problem of money laundering that have hitherto been neglected. These include the nature of the treaty obligations to criminalise money laundering, and the role of soft law as a technique to regulate it globally. The book concludes that international legal harmonisation and approximation of domestic anti-money laundering law through soft law remains helpful in addressing this pressing problem. The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, and policy-makers working in the areas of Financial Crime, Anti-Money Laundering Law, Regulation, International Soft Law, and Comparative Law.

The overarching aim of this book is to bring order to the subjects of money laundering and of the anti-money laundering frameworks that have been written over the past thirty years. It provides scholars, practitioners and policy makers with a guide to what is known of the subject thus far. The book examines critically the underlying assumptions of research and of policy-making in the field and offers a systematic review of the most important policy and academic literature on the subject.

This book provokes fresh ways of thinking about small developing States within the transnational legal order for combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism and proliferation (TAMLO). From the global wars on drugs and terror to journalistic exposés such as the ‘Paradise’, ‘Panama’ and ‘Pandora’ Papers, the Commonwealth Caribbean has been discursively stigmatised as a mythical island paradise of ‘rogue’ States. Not infrequently, their exercise of regulatory self-determination has been presented as the selling of their economic sovereignty to facilitate shady business deals and illicit finance from high-net-worth individuals, kleptocrats, tax-dodgers, organised crime networks and terrorist financiers. This book challenges conventional wisdom that Commonwealth Caribbean States are among the ‘weakest links’ within the global ecosystem to counter illicit finance. It achieves this by unmasking latent interests, and problematising coercive extraterritorial regulatory and surveillance practices, along the onshore/offshore and Global North/South axes. Interdisciplinary in its outlook, the book will appeal to policymakers, regulatory and supervisory authorities, academics and students concerned with better understanding legal and development policy issues related to risk-based regulatory governance of illicit finance. The book also provides an interesting exposition of substantive legal and policy issues arising from money laundering related to corruption and politically exposed persons, offshore finance, and offshore Internet gambling services.