The Kremlin’s continued, barbaric invasion of Ukraine has shone a light on the paramount importance of providing support for sanctions enforcement and closing the blindspots to corrupt and illicit flows in our financial system. Underfunding and understaffing threaten to take the bite out of sanctions and give Putin cover from the West’s best financial tools to counter Russia’s illegal aggression.
Requiring private fund advisers to conduct and report basic customer due diligence is key for defending U.S. financial markets from bad and corrupt actors.
Reforms advocated for by FACT, including those pertaining to beneficial ownership of anonymous shell entities, removing opacity from the U.S. real estate, private investment, and other luxury goods markets, and promoting greater tax transparency can bring the economic weight of new sanctions to bear. The U.S. must work expediently with its allies to permanently close financial gateways for Russia’s political elite to hide and grow their illicit wealth.
FACT Government Affairs Director Erica Hanichak spoke before the Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee in a hearing on the Pandora Papers. In her oral testimony, she stressed that Congress must fulfill its role in denying financial safe haven to tax evaders, drug traffickers, human rights abusers, kleptocrats, terror financiers, and sanctions dodgers.
On December 6, the Brookings Institution, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Center for European Policy Analysis, the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group, the FACT Coalition, and the Leveraging Transparency to Reduce Corruption initiative will co-host a seminar on the fight against corruption and its relationship to advancing democracy and addressing democratic backsliding globally.
Casey Michel’s new book, “American Kleptocracy” (released Nov. 23), is an investigative look into how the U.S. built “the largest illicit offshore finance system the world has ever known” and how this system has “infected American politics, threatened US national security and gouged local communities.”
