June 16, 2020
By Julia Yansura and Laura Porras Today, June 16th marks the International Day of Family Remittances, dedicated to recognizing the contributions of the international migrants who send over US$550 billion home to developing countries each year. And...
June 3, 2020
by John A. Cassara John Cassara is a former US Treasury Special Agent and is on the Board of Directors of Global Financial Integrity. He has written numerous articles and books on money laundering and threat finance....
May 1, 2020
Editor’s Note: This opinion piece was written by a former US Treasury official, who has requested anonymity. Many illicit finance experts agree trade-based money laundering (TBML) is one of the largest, if not the largest, money laundering...
By Tom Cardamone, September 9, 2019
Editor’s note: this piece was originally published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on August 28, 2019. Earlier this year, an important legal complaint filed in the state of Delaware alleged that two Ukrainian oligarchs laundered hundreds of millions of...
June 20, 2019
By Ben Iorio With the rise of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, the norms for currency have changed. Cryptocurrencies allow transactions to take place with a currency not regulated by any country. In essence, cryptocurrencies are currencies existing completely...
By Daniel Neale, January 9, 2019
A systemic problem persists in banks’ ability and willingness to stop dirty money from flowing through the financial system. But when will it stop, or even diminish?
By Heather Lowe, February 8, 2018
Yesterday’s announcement of a guilty plea by Rabobank NA with corresponding penalty and forfeiture of $369 million did not immediately strike people as new or surprising. In fact, the pattern of anti-money laundering/Bank Secrecy Act (AML/BSA) violations...
By Heather Lowe, June 2, 2015
Following from my blogs on Friday and Monday about different aspects of the FIFA case, I’d like to talk a little bit about the forfeiture funds and penalty payments that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) will be collecting in this case and what will happen to them. A proceeding like the FIFA case can result in a really large pile of cash that will be under DOJ control. Unless the Defendants are acquitted of the charges against them at trial or the DOJ decides to drop the case against a Defendant for some reason, we can expect that the DOJ will be collecting from those Defendants the bribe money that they received, anything they bought with that money that will then be auctioned off (for example, check out the list of real estate that will likely go under the hammer in Florida and Georgia from paragraph 343 of the indictment), and, possibly, additional fines in the form of penalties. It is going to add up.
It is obviously critical that the DOJ, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and other government agencies that were involved in this case are able to recoup the money they spent working on this investigation over the past few years. Another way of looking at it is that they need to keep a sizable chunk in order to ensure that they have the resources to work cases like this over the next few years. No matter how you slice it, that’s important to American taxpayers as well, who pay less in taxes because the DOJ and other agencies are able to fund part of their work through forfeiture and penalty payments instead of through tax dollars. Win-Win.