Dirty money and its money laundering: to approach this dark affair and its occult springs, Raymond Baker uses both the investigation, the romantic form, and the international political program ….
There are still few books on the flows of dirty money and the drifts it leads to the capitalist system. The task is difficult and is often perceived for many as too complex. It is however the challenge that Raymond Baker launched two years ago, by publishing Capitalism’s Achilles Heel. Dirty Money and How To Renew the Free-Market Systemhas been translated for a few months into French. The author is a former businessman, who began his career in Nigeria before continuing these activities in international trade in other developing countries. Converted since the academic world, he intervenes in several Think Tank Americans, Center for International Policy and Brookings Institutionwhere he animates seminars on dirty money.
Raymond Baker’s book is both a manual and a novel, a manual because the author presents, in a educational way, the great methods of concealing funds from mafia crimes, terrorism or tax fraud. From the start of the book, he explains, bluntly, fraud techniques: screens companies, fictitious prices, false invoices and other tricks of all kinds. Roman, because he dotted his work with examples, concrete and relevant, around the world: corruption, diversions, corruption, tax evasion, but also trafficking, smuggling, drugs, prostitution, counterfeiting, everything goes. The phenomenon is global and the landscape of accused personalities is diverse ; That called Mobutu, Jeffrey Skilling, old CEO From Enron or Osama bin Laden, many of them use it.
Dirty money has taken such proportions that it represents “ a threat to global stability and prosperity »Urges Raymond Baker. Since the 1960s, the West has built a global structure aimed at facilitating the movement of dirty money between countries. Tax and judicial havens, banking secrecy, trusts, false foundations, money laundering and the countless tax niches encouraged the proliferation of planetary circuits immensely favorable to trafficking and diversions. For this fervent defender of capitalism, the current economic system has become unfair and producer of inequality, far from theories advanced by Adam Smith. He was struck during his professional life by the degree of corruption, poor governance and the poor institutions of a large number of developing countries, realities often encouraged by Western governments and multinationals. This development tends to extend elsewhere and to become “ The Achille heel »Of capitalism.
For Raymond Baker, this stolen, diverted, escaped money would represent 2 % at 5 % of GDP global between 1000 and $ 1500 billion a year, half of which would come from developing countries. He distinguishes three forms of dirty money:
- Corruption (about 3 % of the amount)
- Crime (30 to 35 %) Drugs between $ 120 and 200 billion dollars, counterfeiting between 80 and 120, racketeering between 50 and 100, in total crime money is estimated between $ 300 and $ 550 billion.
- Commercial (60 to 65 % of the total) in particular the practice of “ transfer price Multinationals, which exchange by-products between their various subsidiaries at prices calculated at best to escape the taxman.
These figures remain estimates since, for ten years, despite the speeches, neither the World Bank nor the United Nations wanted to carry out an in -depth study on this scourge. The author thus notes, in the rest of the work, the successive failures of the public policies implemented by international institutions and states to track down dirty money. Success rates are very low, in the United States, it is estimated at 0.1% of the amounts at stake. Banks are indeed very reluctant to see legislation which would deprive them of significant deposits. They manage more than one trillion in illicit products each year, such as the American bank, Citibank, which has welcomed the colossal sums of the Pinochet (Chile), Obiang (Equatorial Guinea), Bongo (Gabon), without ever worrying about the origin of this money.
For Raymond Baker, it is therefore urgent that the international community quickly makes radical decisions to reduce the flows of dirty money. He thus sets out, in the last part of his work, a certain number of solutions: prohibiting the use of tax and judicial paradises, modifying the legislation of companies, integrating the tax question in the debates around the social responsibility of companies, strengthening of the rules on money laundering in global financial centers … It is only that we can renew capitalism and combat evolving.