The scale of American financial secrecy has created a money laundering golden age
Charles G. Davidson and Ben Judah, 2023 – *publisher of The American Interest and a former Freedom House board member. From 2014 to 2018, he was executive director of the Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative, and **senior fellow at the Atlantic Council “How Financial Secrecy Undermines Democracy” Journal of Democracy, October, https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/how-financial-secrecy-undermines-democracy/ //DH
Accepting secrecy’s “enablers” and the full spate of its instruments is also undermining the West’s ability to compete with authoritarian powers and protect Western political institutions.17 Kleptocrats in Russia or China can move money anonymously into the West, buying assets and building networks that facilitate political interference and compromise Western nations’ security and democratic institutions. The sheer scale of global financial secrecy, moreover, has made possible a golden age of money laundering that aids kleptocrats in converting stolen wealth into new sources of power. These can include corrupted Western officials, private armies of mercenaries, and phalanxes of enablers recruited from Western professional ranks.18