Offshore, Regulation & enforcement, Scoops
Pacific News Service, Dec 20, 2000
Criminals — drug dealers or dictators — with embarrassing amounts of cash on hand, or corporations trying to avoid taxation, often use false fronts in poor countries to launder the funds. Major U.S. banks are heavily involved in this unsavory business, so banker Robert Rubin Robert Rubinmay face some interesting questions from the other members of a UN panel intended to help debtor nations.
There is more than a little irony in the appointment of Robert Rubin, a chairman of Citibank, to a United Nations panel which is supposed to propose methods for helping poor countries.
Offshore, Regulation & enforcement, Scoops
eCountries.com, Dec 15, 2000
The net around money launderers may be getting a bit tighter, with a new treaty signed in Palermo under the auspices of the UN. It’s a step in the right direction, but a lot remains to be done to effectively combat what has become a global plague.
For more than a decade, the international community has been wrestling with the issue of what to do about the worldwide bank secrecy system that allows drug traffickers, fraudulent business operators and tax cheats to flourish.
Offshore, Scoops
Pacific News Service, Oct 16, 2000.
Washington denies any problem, as does the International Monetary Fund. But Russians who should know are sure that a $4.8 billion loan never reached its destination. They have been joined recently by Swiss prosecutors who are equally skeptical. PNS contributor Lucy Komisar is a freelance journalist who, sponsored by PNS, spent three months in Russia on a U.S. National Research Council grant to investigate the impact of offshore bank and corporate secrecy.
What really happened to the $4.8 billion?
Offshore, Scoops
The Moscow Times, Oct 3, 2000
When news broke in August 1999 that somewhere from $7 billion to $15 billion had been spirited out of Russia through the Bank of New York, in what looked to U.S. investigators to be money laundering, American bankers professed shock. A month after those revelations, Bank of New York CEO Thomas Renyi told the U.S. House Banking Committee how dismayed I have been by the suggestions in the press that the Bank of New York has been involved in, or been used as a vehicle for, money laundering or other illicit activities.
Offshore, Regulation & enforcement, Scoops
Earth Times News Service, May 7, 2000
Two far-reaching and potentially controversial anti-money laundering measures would require professionals such as lawyers and accountants to file the same sort of suspicious transaction reports that banks do and would extend know your customer rules to include the owners of companies. The Council of Europe has already proposed the first. US authorities have not acted on either.
