1 - Global standards, governance and the risk-based approach

Summary

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.

Mark Twain

“Money is not the root of all evil”, said the finance manager in the audience, “It's the love of money, which causes all the trouble”. He was right, of course, and his contribution corrected all future presentations given by this author. There is nothing wrong with money itself, the evil comes from the bad behaviour of people. The behaviour is the ‘evil’ that makes good money dirty and has done since biblical times.

Nowadays we use the word ‘crime’ to describe evil in our national legislation, across the world, and some lesser evils we describe as ‘breaches of regulations’. But they too create dirty money. Every year, millions of crimes and breaches of regulations generate billions of dollars. Evil may be a strong word, but crime kills people or causes irreparable harm to our lives, our bodies, even our dreams and ambitions. Enabling all this evil is money laundering, the crime of handling dirty money. So, if you are not angry now, you should be. You, and everyone you know is worse off than they could be. Your water, the very air you breathe contains extra polluting particles that are there because someone, somewhere, broke an environmental rule to get some dirty money. There is no escape, everything you see about you is tainted by money laundering.

It does not have to be this way. The regime to control money laundering and its many evils, is not protecting us, but it could be so easily redesigned and at the same time, strengthened. This chapter, and those that follow are about how we tackle global crime by targeting the money. Even as you read this chapter, wherever you are, whoever you are, you too will likely have access to money. Money, by the way, in the context of this book, means money's worth. So, it also includes the home in which you are perhaps sat reading this book, or the device which you are reading it on, or the book itself. Laws will sometimes use the words ‘property’ or ‘goods’, so you will see these words too, but unless the example is very specific, we are referring to anything, because any asset with a monetary value is capable of being laundered.