Offshore, Regulation & enforcement, Scoops
Earth Times News Service, May 14, 2001
PARIS — OECD Secretary General Donald Johnston says he is pleased about the OECD commitment to try to stop companies from its own member states from bribing public officials in other countries. But, he added, that effort needs to be extended to cover bribery of corporate officials as well.
The Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions entered into force in February 1999. It commits 34 signatory countries, including all the world’s biggest economies, to adopt common rules to punish companies and individuals who engage in bribery.
Offshore, Regulation & enforcement, Scoops
Pacific News Service, Dec 20, 2000
Criminals — drug dealers or dictators — with embarrassing amounts of cash on hand, or corporations trying to avoid taxation, often use false fronts in poor countries to launder the funds. Major U.S. banks are heavily involved in this unsavory business, so banker Robert Rubin Robert Rubinmay face some interesting questions from the other members of a UN panel intended to help debtor nations.
There is more than a little irony in the appointment of Robert Rubin, a chairman of Citibank, to a United Nations panel which is supposed to propose methods for helping poor countries.
Offshore, Regulation & enforcement, Scoops
eCountries.com, Dec 15, 2000
The net around money launderers may be getting a bit tighter, with a new treaty signed in Palermo under the auspices of the UN. It’s a step in the right direction, but a lot remains to be done to effectively combat what has become a global plague.
For more than a decade, the international community has been wrestling with the issue of what to do about the worldwide bank secrecy system that allows drug traffickers, fraudulent business operators and tax cheats to flourish.
Offshore, Regulation & enforcement, Scoops
Earth Times News Service, May 7, 2000
Two far-reaching and potentially controversial anti-money laundering measures would require professionals such as lawyers and accountants to file the same sort of suspicious transaction reports that banks do and would extend know your customer rules to include the owners of companies. The Council of Europe has already proposed the first. US authorities have not acted on either.
Offshore, Regulation & enforcement, Scoops
Earth Times News Service, Oct 31, 1999
The dangers of international money laundering are massively magnified by electronic transfers and the new electronic cash. The really big challenge that’s coming, that’s arrived, is electronic cash, said Thomas Roche, Deputy General Counsel of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s going to present really daunting challenges. There’s always been an audit trail in credit cards and checks.
