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Global Corruption Report 2001
Levi, Michael
Levi, Michael
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gi_money_laundering.pdf
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Abstract
Criminals, whether narcotics dealers or corrupt heads of state, have long used secret accounts, trusts in false names and other devices to launder the proceeds of their crimes. An estimated US $500 billion to US $1.5 trillion are laundered through banks each year1 – though these figures include huge transaction costs and consumables and do not represent net criminal savings. Now, as national and international regulators start to enforce new banking rules and the banking industry is beginning to respond with its own voluntary efforts, there are fewer places where the proceeds of crime can be hidden without risk of exposure. Prominent cases have demonstrated just how recent these changes are. In the late 1980s, Citibank in London accepted as clients two young ‘commodity and oil dealers’, Ibrahim and Mohamed Sani Abacha. Bank files recorded the brothers as the sons of Zachary Abacha, ‘a well-connected and respected member of the northern Nigerian community’, but no mention was made that Abacha senior (later head of state) was a general in the Nigerian army and chairman of the country’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.2 By 1998, the Sani Abachas had deposited US $60 million with Citibank.3 The Sani Abachas and other members of the Abacha circle allegedly stole an estimated US $4.3 billion over a number of years – about half of it from the Nigerian central bank. The web of banks and jurisdictions implicated in these thefts is wide and tangled. So far, more than US $1.4 billion has been found and frozen in banks in Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland.
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2001
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393571100X
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With permission of the license/copyright holder