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.
FACT’s Erica Hanichak is quoted in Politico: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shines a spotlight on what we already know — kleptocrats and criminals have manipulated the chinks in the armor protecting Western financial systems in order to safeguard their own ill-gotten gains,”
Inadequate funding for the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI) jeopardizes the enforcement of new U.S. sanctions in light of President Putin’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine.
The FACT Coalition welcomed the White House announcement of a “multilateral Transatlantic task force” to identify and freeze the assets of sanctioned Russian companies and oligarchs.
Commercial Support for Ownership Disclosure Grows as National Foreign Trade Council Backs Incorporation Transparency
Momentum continues to build in the fight to tackle the abuse of anonymous shell companies.
Richard Sawaya, the vice president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents major U.S. multinational businesses, just endorsed cracking down on money laundering and anonymous shell companies in a new op-ed in The Hill regarding Russia sanctions.
While the FACT Coalition takes no position on most of the content in the op-ed, the penultimate paragraph of the article says:
“Congress should focus on… incorporating new ideas… that would crack down on Russian money laundering and shell corporations, expose the financial crimes of Putin cronies, and prevent U.S. real estate from being a haven for kleptocrat money, all without measurably hurting the U.S. economy.”
NFTC—whose’s board of directors consists of major U.S. businesses including Caterpillar, Coca-Cola, Exxon, Fluor, General Electric, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, and Walmart—joins the entire financial services industry, the National Association of Realtors, the vast majority of small business owners, and other large companies such as Dow Chemical, Unilever, and Salesforce in pushing for incorporation transparency.
With every passing week we have new evidence of the threat that Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy poses to our democracy, our national security, and the entire liberal world order. Putin’s regime—something akin to an organized crime ring masquerading as a state—has looted the wealth of Russia, subjugated its people, attacked neighboring former republics of the USSR, annexed Crimea, and hacked the electoral process in the United States and other Western democracies.
