Financial Crime Matters

“It will happen to you: sooner or later, all financial institutions will be in the midst of a new scheme or scandal,” Matis Maeker, head of Estonia’s Financial Supervisory Authority warns. Drawing on his experience addressing the scandals involving money laundering out of the Russian Federation and as a leader in Estonia’s effort to build a tougher AML/CFT regime, Matis, talks with Kieran about the challenges faced by both supervisory authorities and the entities they oversee in preventing financial crime. A lawyer with Estonia’s FSA since 2012 and head of the authority’s AML/CFT department for the past two-years, Maeker also shares lessons from the “AML Compliance Book: 150 Golden Rules,” which he has just co-authored with his colleague Andre Nomm. A member of the MONEYVAL Bureau and also an alternate member of the European Banking Authority Anti-Money Laundering Standing Committee, Matis has been a speaker at a number of ACAMS conferences. His “AML Compliance Book: 150 Golden Rules”is available from a number of sources, including Amazon.com.

“we were able to identify a number of financial indicators that… really allowed us to identify potential perpetrators of this crime,” Barry MacKillop, Fintrac. “an area being under reported and investigated in Canada and globally,” Stuart Davis, Scotiabank. Kieran talks with Barry MacKillop, deputy director at The Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre (Fintrac) and Stuart Davis, Scotiabank’s global head of financial crimes risk management, about “Project Shadow,” a public-private partnership (PPP) that combats the online sexual exploitation of children in all it’s forms. Co-lead by Scotiabank and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, and with the support of Fintrac, Project Shadow seeks to raise awareness, identify red flags, and increase reporting of suspicious transactions associated with the exploitation of children. Formally launched this month, Project Shadow is the fifth Canadian PPP created since 2016, when “Project Protect” was launched to fight human trafficking.

Kieran talks with Daniel Stipano, a 30-year veteran of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, about the “Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020,” the most revolutionary piece of anti-financial crime legislation to emerge from Congress since the “USA Patriot Act.” Now a partner with the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, Dan details how the Act creates a national corporate ownership registry, new examination criteria for financial institutions and Bank Secrecy Act responsibilities for art and antiquities dealers as well what to expect from the regulation writing process necessary to flesh out the Act over the next several years.

Kieran Beer interviews the award-winning Financial Times Investigations Correspondent, Tom Burgis about his new book, ‘Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World’. In this episode, Tom reveals how private bankers, law firms and intelligence groups help dictators, oligarchs and organised crime penetrate democracies, and flood the global economy with dirty money. During his career, Tom has exposed major corruption scandals, covered terrorist attacks, coups and forgotten conflicts, and traced illicit money flows from the Kremlin to Washington. Read Tom’s bio: https://tomburgis.com

‘If you don’t understand who’s behind a shell company, you’re not going to understand what’s going on with a multi-million-dollar transaction moving across borders.’ Mike Hudson and Spencer Woodman, investigative journalists at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), talk with Kieran about the 16 months of reporting that went into making sense of the FinCEN files - more than 2000 leaked SARs linking the world’s biggest banks to Jho Low, Paul Manafort, Russian oligarchs, and international crime networks. Mike and Spencer detail their investigative methods and describe the systemic failures that led to billions of dollars of dirty money being funnelled through the global financial system. Read Mike’s bio: https://www.icij.org/journalists/michael-hudson Read Spencer’s bio: https://www.icij.org/journalists/spencer-woodman

'Everybody has something they can do to begin to address [human trafficking] in their day-to-day business.' Dr. James Cockayne is Head of Secretariat of Finance Against Slavery and Trafficking (FAST), a year-old United Nations initiative enlisting financial institutions in the fight against human trafficking. In this episode, James talks with Kieran about how financial institutions can help track and interdict the proceeds of human trafficking, shun investment in businesses that profit from trafficking, and help the victims of modern slavery re-enter the global financial system. FAST has partnered with ACAMS to provide the anti-human trafficking training and certification program “Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking.” For more about FAST and the free ACAMS training go here https://www.fastinitiative.org and here https://www.acams.org/en/training/certificates/fighting-modern-slavery-and-human-trafficking.

'I could see in plain sight that there were dots to be joined' Clare Rewcastle Brown first broke the 1MDB scandal in 2015, and has followed and reported on all of the developments ever since, in the Sarawak Report. In this episode Clare talks with Kieran about the latest fallout from 1MDB, the scale and scope of the corruption, and how banks can do more to detect these crimes in the early stages. Find the Sarawak Report at: https://www.sarawakreport.org

Sam Cooper is an investigative journalist who has dedicated his career to exposing moneylaundering in British Columbia. From moneylaundering operations in Canadian casinos, to Chinese millionaires smuggling in cash to buy swathes of Vancouver real estate (but not to live in), Sam talks Kieran through the financial crime typologies, scams and trends he's observed during his investigations in recent years. Follow Sam on Twitter for more scoops: https://twitter.com/scoopercooper

‘All too often criminal investigations hit a dead end when law enforcement encounters a company with hidden ownership’. In this episode, Edward Kitt (Illicit Finance Policy Lead at the British Embassy in Washington DC) and Kieran talk about the UK’s public beneficial ownership register, tangible benefits of the public-private partnership group JMLIT, and how effective global information sharing might be the answer to solving both new, and cold, cases in human trafficking, moneylaundering, art & antiquities trafficking…and more. Read the full UK Economic Crime plan at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/economic-crime-plan-2019-to-2022

Michael Sachs talks to Kieran Beer about the cutting-edge work that the Manhattan District Attorney's office is doing to take down cybercrime. From scams involving Michael Jordan sneakers and black market Xanax, to a crypto armed robbery, he's seen it all. Their discussion also cover the ambiguities of this new world, including ongoing tensions between law enforcement and tech companies around device encryption, and the due diligence (or otherwise) being undertaken by innovative exchange channels like Bitcoin ATMs. See Michael's bio at: https://www.manhattanda.org/about-the-office/executive-team/