Regulatory Watch News

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  Treasury Targets Corruption Networks Linked to Transnational Organized Crime

  US Treasury

  December 8, 2021

  Global Magnitsky Designations Target Nexus Between Public Corruption and Organized Crime

  WASHINGTON — Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is targeting 16 individuals and 24 entities across several countries in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Today’s actions are taken pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13818, which builds upon and implements the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, and targets perpetrators of corruption and serious human rights abuse.

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  Global Financial Integrity Praises the First U.S. Strategy on Countering Corruption

  Global Financial Integrity

  December 8, 2021

  December 8, 2021

  WASHINGTON D.C. – Global Financial Integrity (GFI) praises the release of a first of its kind “United States Strategy on Countering Corruption” released by the White House. This strategy document provides a comprehensive approach to fighting corruption both in the U.S. and abroad that will have an impact on many facets of illicit finance including corruption, money laundering and tax avoidance. One of the most impactful steps recommended in this document to curb illicit finance is beneficial ownership regulations to address anonymous shell companies. Identifying the beneficial owner of all legal entities is vital to addressing illicit finance as this is the easiest way for bad actors to move money with illicit origins and is virtually untraceable.

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  FATF High-Level Conference on Environmental Crime

  FATF

  December 8, 2021

  Financial Action Task Force (FATF) President Dr. Marcus Pleyer calls for a global push to take the illicit profits out of environmental crimes, at a high-level FATF conference involving the public, private, not-for-profit sectors and academia. Environmental crimes generate around USD 110 to USD 281 billion in criminal gains each year and include illegal logging, illegal mining, waste dumping and other crimes. “Tackling money laundering linked to environmental crime is an often overlooked part of a much larger solution to helping save our climate,” said Dr. Pleyer in his opening remarks. “At the moment, far too often, criminals and their gangs are getting away with it. They make billions from looting our planet.” For the first time, heads of international organisations including the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) met with the FATF to discuss how to develop partnerships to tackle the dirty money that helps fuel environmental crimes. Fellow keynote speakers Espen Barth Eide, Norway’s Minister of Climate and Environment, and Dr. Dame Jane Goodall, primatologist and ethologist, also emphasised the need for coordinated action.