How To Launder Money From Deforestation, Toxic Mining In S. America? Easy - US Shell Companies Buying Real Estate
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According to the report’s findings, 25% of all cases, and 44% of “follow the money” cases, involved at least one foreign jurisdiction. The U.S. was the foreign jurisdiction mentioned most across all cases analyzed, either as a transit or destination point for illegally sourced natural resources, such as gold or timber, or dirty money. Robert Muggah, co-founder of the Brazilian-based think tank Igarapé Institute, told Mongabay this is because of “the abundance of shell companies, front companies and trade-based fraud that allow criminal actors to wash dirty money” in the country.
“To a large extent, U.S. businesses have not historically been required to identify their true beneficial owners to the Treasury Department,” he explained over email. “In the meantime, owing to uneven regulatory oversight and enforcement, U.S. banks have allowed large sums of cash to be transferred in the financial system by individuals involved in corruption, fraud and sanctions evasion.” Another reason why the U.S. is central to this network is because real estate is exempt from many rules related to countering money laundering, Muggah explained. “Networks of shell companies and foreign investors often purchase real estate to launder billions of dollars of profits generated by, among other things, environmental crime.”
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Environmental crime was almost always accompanied by other converging crimes, such as corruption and drug trafficking, the FACT Coalition found. Among the 230 environmental crimes analyzed, corruption was by far the most prevalent, followed by terrorism financing and drug trafficking. According to research carried out by the Financial Action Task Force, wildlife traffickers often exploit weaknesses in the financial and nonfinancial sectors to move, hide and launder their profits. The annual revenue generated by the global illegal wildlife trade has been estimated at $20 billion per year.
Amid conversations at the COP16 biodiversity summit about funding collective efforts to protect biodiversity, Yansura said that by tackling environmental crime, which generates up to $281 billion a year, governments could recover and use the money to help restore damaged ecosystems and safeguard natural resources.
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https://news.mongabay.com/2024/11/report-reveals-how-environmental-crime-profits-in-the-amazon-are-laundered/