Dirty dealing Press reports suggest that the illegal grey economy in the Czech Republic amounts to about 10 per cent of the country’s Gross National Product. A 1996 report published by Chulalongkom University in Bangkok estimated that a figure equal to 15 per cent of the country’s GDP ($28.5 billion) was laundered criminal money. In 1998 the National Bank of Poland reported that more than $2 billion is laundered in the country per annum. In Belarus it has been estimated that 30 per cent of the country’s GDP is money laundering. Mexican drug cartels (now more powerful than their contempo- raries in Colombia) are conservatively estimated to generate profits of more than $9 billion per year – that is approximately 5 per cent of Mexico’s GDP The Canadian Solicitor General commented in 1998 that the illicit funds generated and laundered in Canada each year were between $5 and $17 billion. The Swiss Finance Ministry confirmed in the same year that Switzerland was implicated in $500 billion of money laundering each year. Although no official figure exists it has been reliably esti- mated that between $40 to $50 billion of Russian money resides in Swiss banks; realistically, there is little way of knowing whether it is flight capital or laundered money. Whilst it is not considered at the forefront of the money laundering problem, in July 1998 the Egyptian Federation of Banks estimated that each year $3 billion is laundered in the country. In Indonesia, which has a rapidly escalating money laundering problem, one US law enforcement agency states that $500,000 is washed on a weekly basis by West Africans and Southeast Asians using West African couriers. The Republic of Ireland, with its growing financial centre of Dublin, estimates that in 1998 $126 million was suspected of being laundered through the country. Informal estimates voiced in 1997 were that yearly money launder- ing activity in Italy totalled over $50 billion. And then at a global level... The United Nations Human Development Report of 1999 commented that organized crime syndicates grossed $1.5 trillion per annum – which is more than many developed economies and multinational corporations. Recent figures from the International Monetary Fund suggest that the amount is now nearer $2 trillion. In March 1998, Dow Jones News reported that money laundering amounted to between 2 and 5 per cent of world GDP: in other words between $1 and 3 trillion. It is estimated that there are in excess of 200 million drug users in the world and in 1995 the world’s illegal narcotics trade was calculated at $400 billion. This total is equivalent to 8 per cent of the world’s trade – that is more than motor vehicles, iron and steel and about the same as the gas and oil industry. In 1999, a Congressional hearing was told that up to $48 billion per year in profits were generated by illegal drug sales, which was laun- dered. If you accept – and I think you should – that the scale of global money laundering each year is at least $1.5 trillion then either the staggering, horrifying scale of the whole problem suddenly snaps into place or you are so bemused that you still don’t really believe it. Let’s put that $1.5 trillion figure into context, in real and comparative terms: $1.5 trillion is $1,500,000,000,000 – which, when put like that, is even more astounding. The estimated GDP of the United States in 1998 was $8.511 trillion – thus the annual money laundering figure is 17 per cent of this. Or to put it another way the GDP of the United States is only just five times that of Global Organized Crime Inc. In fact the figure of $1.5 trillion is only dwarfed by three individual countries’ economies. The largest corporation quoted in the Fortune 500 as at February 2000 is General Motors, with a turnover of $161,315,000,000, which is about a tenth of the amount laundered each year. (In other words, money laundering per annum is 10 times the annual turnover of General Motors.) The GDP of Switzerland is $191,000,000,000 – just an eighth of the annual money laundering figure.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 01:47:36 +0000
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