Book

Description

Four scandals. One system that let them all happen. HSBC moved money for drug cartels. Wachovia laundered billions for Mexican currency-exchange houses with barely a second look. Danske Bank's tiny Estonian branch processed €200 billion in suspicious non-resident transactions. And 1MDB became one of the largest sovereign corruption schemes in modern history — funneled through the same respected banks, law firms, and offshore structures the global financial system relies on every day. Global Money Laundering and Institutional Failure argues that these were not isolated criminal conspiracies operating in the shadows. They were failures of the institutions meant to stop them: weak customer due diligence, opaque beneficial ownership, fragmented regulators, and compliance departments with neither the independence nor the authority to say no. Drawing on a comparative legal analysis of all four cases, Naavya Bhardwaj traces how illicit money entered the legitimate financial system, why the penalties that followed rarely matched the scale of the harm, and what would actually need to change — in banking governance, beneficial-ownership transparency, and cross-border enforcement — to make the next scandal harder to hide.