16 - National security vs the threat of money laundering

Summary

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it. Upton Sinclair – candidate for Governor of

California 1935

If Ben Bradlee, an editor at the Washington Post during the US Watergate scandal was right when he said, ‘It is my experience that most claims of national security are part of a campaign to avoid telling the truth’, then discussing money laundering as a threat to national security needs to be included in this book.

Bradlee's statement suggests by attributing national security to any topic, it then becomes too sensitive to discuss openly in public. Any such move then to resolve it must require sensitive management and coordination at the highest levels of government administration. So, does this now mean telling the truth about money laundering is so awful that it has to be attributed as a threat to national security to protect us? Yet is money laundering really a threat to national security? Maybe it once was, but with such vast amounts of ‘dirty money’ now in circulation, has the threat simply gone away? Has the threat dispersed to such a point that it is hard to pinpoint where the actual threat to national security is now coming from?

With the lack of tangible knowledge on money laundering as it is happening today, as discussed in Chapter 3, it is still easy to believe money laundering has a significant bearing on national economies. This is regardless of it being attributed as a customary practice of most serious crimes. Nevertheless, attributing money laundering to national security seems to be all too easy for the policy writers, government officials and those who navigate the direction of AML/CFT compliance regimes.

Of course, there are many definitions of national security, each one we suggest relating back to the reasons by which it was created. Still, it is possible to generically determine national security as ‘a nation state's ability to protect or defend its people’. So where then is the evidence that money laundering is a threat to national security? Is it with suggestions like those of the IMF who have estimated money laundering comprises approximately 2– 5% of the world's gross domestic product (GDP) each year, or approximately US$1.74– US$4.35 trillion in 2019?