Background Briefing: September 23, 2020
We Should Blame Politicians Who Accept Dirty Money More Than the Kleptocrats Who Bribe Them
We begin and go to the U.K. to discuss the fallout from the leaked FinCEN SARs, Suspicious Activities Reports implicating major banks in particular in the U.K. where British companies were named in the SARs reports made public by Buzzfeed News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists more than 3,000 times, more than any other country, describing the U.K. as “a higher risk jurisdiction” than notorious dirty money laundromats like Cyprus. We speak with Oliver Bullough, a journalist and author whose latest book is Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take it Back. He joins us to discuss his article at codastory.com, “Oligarchy, Special Edition: Blame politicians, not banks, for the FinCEN mess” and explain why financial investigators who process the SARs, Suspicious Activities Reports, are so overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of them, and given that the reports are sent in from the banks themselves who facilitate money-laundering, very few prosecutions result. Oliver does not blame Putin and those who bribe politicians with dirty money as much as the politicians themselves who accept kleptocratic money often stolen from the poorest countries.
A Flagrant Miscarriage of Justice in Kentucky