White-Collar Organised Crime and Its Impact Internationally — with an Emphasis on Money Laundering
How the western banking system is ripping off the world
The danger bestowed upon the world through white-collar crime on an organised and large-scale basis is perhaps one of the greatest threats to the security of the copacetic mythical ‘village’ (Newton, 2006, p. 30) — to the security and happiness of billions in developing and developed nations. The poorest in the world, and also, increasingly, the ‘petit Bourgeoisie’ and aspiring middle classes of Marx’s Communist Manifesto are reeling from the burden of austerity. State sanctioned swingeing cuts to state welfare and investment were made in order to save money after states paid out the incredible sums of taxpayer money needed to bail out private financial institutions deemed ‘too big to fail’ after the global crash of 2007/8 (Grice, 2009; Oxfam, 2013). I aim to show in this work that in fact much of that crash and myriad global financial malpractice has involved white-collar organised crime that was engineered and state sponsored in the US and UK as well as other major nations, with a combination of bad policy structures, reckless deregulation and straightforward collusion of corporations and states. This corrupt policy led to the creation of housing bubbles, crashes and a recession and resulted in ‘trillions of dollars in capital and the victimisation of hundreds of millions of people worldwide’ (Barak, 2016, p. 3). I aim to help scotch the myth of this ‘respectable’ crime (Sutherland, 1949) and show that, organised white collar crime is vital to all forms of serious transnational organised crime, as it is needed to cleanse profits through specifically mass level money laundering. Money laundering will be a recurring topic in this essay. I hope to illustrate how it connects all serious transnational organised crime.
Within this paper I also wish to show the damage caused to the UK and states internationally by corporate financial white-collar organised crime involving especially money laundering, but also fraud, LIBOR rigging, criminal collusion on a state level as well as other misdemeanors and expose the apparent lack of will from state governments and judiciaries around the world to prevent and eliminate the problem with sufficient sanctions and punishments (Oxfam, 2013, p. 5; Barak, 2016, p. 1). I will often use examples of the ways developed countries have been corrupted and influenced by nefarious corporate powers that use an organised white-collar criminal fraternity within corporate financial institutions to steal, corrupt and plunder as well as giving numerous examples of the damage caused in the US, UK and the EU especially within these pages. This essay seeks to support that there is an idea of a seemingly culturally-engineered anomaly that encourages white-collar crime to be understood as ‘ideologically normative or culturally acceptable’ (Barak, 2007). Prophesising Marxist philosopher Gramsci stated this would be achieved by cultural hegemons ‘to demonstrate how capitalism is established, maintained and legitimised as well as the role of ideology in establishing what becomes represented as normal or common sense’ (Donoghue, 2018, p. 65). In some cases, I wish to illuminate the apparent collusion of states and corporations practicing organised white-collar crime to facilitate corruption and actions leading to the weakening of internal security and the implementation of widespread poverty — or ‘institutionalised political and economic arrangements’ (Levi, 2012, p. 42) that benefit only the very few and can only damage society. The environmental threat from organised white-collar crime is also severe and yet not necessarily considered in mainstream thinking, but I aim to show within this piece that in fact it is a fundamental player in this arena, that actually organised white-collar organised crime involving money laundering is pivotal to the profitable destruction of the environment in some of the most vulnerable states in the world. I will provide critical evidence of states’ attempts to legalise and control white-collar crime at home and on an international stage and list many of the ambiguities of policing these crimes in a globalised world of sovereign states fostering political corruption and criminal collusion in an anarchic international system of rare multilateral agreement.
White-collar crime is often perpetrated by specific individuals, those often from upper middle class/middle class backgrounds that have had a good education and have found their way into careers that give ample opportunity for financial malpractice. These individuals also almost always have no criminal background. (Berghoff, Hartmut, and Adam Rome, 2016). This has helped give the financial crime so often specialised by the elites a certain glean of respectability and therefore protection from public consternation. White-collar crime is “a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation” (Sutherland, 1949, p. 1). Sutherland almost manages to make the image of white-collar crime sound elegant with his language. His use of the words ‘respectability’ and ‘high social status’ taking ill-gotten gains ‘in the course of his occupation’ is unfortunate in its imagery as part of the apparent protection afforded to white-collar crime is its benign reputation as something not particularly dangerous or emotive (Barak, 2015) although that was certainly Sutherland’s point.
It is a strange phenomenon that in various parts of Europe and the US — though bankers are widely reported to blame for the 2007/8 economic collapse — there have not been many prosecutions of figures from the financial world and the press across the continents have hardly been visceral in calling for mass arrests despite ‘the actions of these banking sectors in the derivatives market, whether fraudulent or grossly negligent, have plausibly generated more socioeconomic harm than fraud committed by transnational organised crime’ (Levi, 2012, p. 40). My obvious argument here is that white-collar organised crime IS transnational organised crime, without money laundering on the scales practiced by corporations like HSBC, Sonali, Citibank and many others violent criminal groups and drug cartels could not have the influence and power they undoubtedly do. Money laundering connects all major transnational organised criminal groups (Nelleman, 2016, p. 65). This type of crime on the scale that has been practiced in recent years is anything but respectful and indeed is more harmful to the world in many ways than any other crime, as it is essential for all types of serious transnational crime to prosper and contributes to more harm on a societal level than any other crime (Newburn, 2018). The damage done on a large scale from white-collar crime is mainly down to mass scale money laundering — which is integral to, and oils the wheels for all types of large-scale transnational crime (UNEP, 2016). White-collar organised crime is in fact public enemy number one on a state level and in an international context despite the often-benign image of most of those that commit it.
The outcome of the tragic crash of 2007/8 is still not completely known and incredibly the states that have used the public purse to bail out the corporate financial sector have not pursued the ‘high net worth individuals’ and corporations that committed the crimes leading to the banking collapse. Bankers from the UK at the center of the crisis had almost no legal comeback for their wrongdoing: ‘The UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) have brought charges against 13 people as part of their investigations into LIBOR-rigging. Of those, eight have been acquitted, four have been found guilty, and one pleaded guilty’ (Lee, 2017).
White-collar crime is often state sponsored in one way or the other (legal dictionary, 2016, p. 1) and perversely, the full power of the state instead continues to prosecute those poorest — involved in overclaiming welfare benefits and other incomparably less damaging financial misdemeanors, in numbers as high in the UK in 2016 as 9000 people were successfully prosecuted for benefit fraud (Newburn, 2018, p. 16). The cost upon society for benefit fraud and low-level opportunistic fraud in the UK and many other world player economies is a fraction annually in comparison to the Trillions of Dollars, Pounds, Euros and myriad denominations that have been sideswiped and plundered in order to enable the aforementioned bail outs (Collins, 2015). This unchecked and stunning hubris of the most powerful corporations on earth and its dreadful consequences have gone relatively unpunished, numbers of prosecutions directly relating to the financial crash in the UK and USA barely reach double figures and this discrepancy points to high-level, state-sanctioned organised crime in even the most developed and stable states in the world. In reference to this point, Levi (2012, p. 40) suggests that ‘Even politically conservative thinkers might think it appropriate to describe the mortgage brokers and elite corporate financial engineers who triggered the global financial crises of 2007 onwards as “organised crime”. There is nothing to suggest, as we race towards the third decade of the 21st century, that financial institutions are any less corrupt or, even more worrying, any less powerful than in 2008 (Marlton, 2019).
The destruction and threat to the very security of small nations involving obvious state collusion with nefarious banking involving criminal enterprise and state-backed mass money laundering are well-documented (Woodard, 2000). However, even in leading economies now incorporating similar policy and collusion with financial corporations, there is a threat to political security and hence the security of even the most powerful sovereign nations. Within the immanence of globalisation, transnational or multinational corporations are far more difficult to control than traditional national corporations. Globalised corporations’ lack of respect for the security of national boundaries have made white-collar crime particularly close to organised crime and ‘Mafioso-type crime and the more traditional types of professional crimes’ (Barak, 2007, p. 210–211). Still somehow, these ‘crimes of the powerful’ are often looked upon in a very different light in comparison with many other less serious societal misdemeanors. Fraud in an unorganised and opportunistic spirit by lone white-collar criminals making money on the side illegally is one thing, but the consequences of large-scale, organised white-collar crime or destructive trading legitimised by state-sanctioned deregulation of corporate elite nefarious trading rules made the life blood of transnational crime — money laundering — as well as many other facets of white-collar organised crime easier, and has caused massive devastation and destabilised entire developed continents, let alone nations. The deregulation of the financial world before the crash has had terrible consequences.
The wave of economic austerity that has swept Europe in the wake of the Great Recession is at risk of doing serious and permanent damage to the continent’s long-cherished social model. As economists, including myself, have long predicted, austerity has only crippled Europe’s growth, with improvements in fiscal positions that are always disappointing. Worse, it is contributing to inequality that will make economic weakness longer-lived, and needlessly contributes to the suffering of the jobless and the poor for many years (Stiglitz, 2013, cited in Oxfam, 2013).
The devastation caused by austerity policy in the wake of the financial crash in the UK has seen the poorest getting poorer and the statistics make grim reading. Professor Phillip Alston, a UN rapporteur on a recent visit to the UK (November 2018) stated ’14 million people, a fifth of the population, live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials.’ (Alston, 2018). Prof. Alston went on to state the apparent lack of urgency from the government presiding over such a situation:
The country’s most respected charitable groups, its leading think tanks, its parliamentary committees, independent authorities like the National Audit Office, and many others, have all drawn attention to the dramatic decline in the fortunes of the least well-off in this country. But through it all, one actor has stubbornly resisted seeing the situation for what it is. The Government has remained determinedly in a state of denial. Even while devolved authorities in Scotland and Northern Ireland are frantically trying to devise ways to ‘mitigate’, or in other words counteract at least the worst features of the Government’s benefits policy, Ministers insisted to me that all is well and running according to plan. (p. 1).
The results of austerity implemented entirely because of the unprecedented financial corporate bailouts are obvious and thanks to Prof. Alston as well as others — they are now well-documented. The response and attempts to ameliorate the urgent problem are depressingly predictable. The EU’s implementation of austerity in Spain, Portugal, Italy and worst of all Greece is having even worse repercussions for the continents poorest and most vulnerable (Oxfam, 2013).
The Utilitarian principle of the social model summed up by John Stuart Mill in his seminal work ‘Utilitarianism’ with the words ‘So act, that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law by all rational beings’ (Mill and Bentham, 2004, p. 277) is in direct opposition to the financial institutions’ seemingly never-ending hubris and selfish society damaging ethos. To quote Hollywood villain Gordon Gekko of ‘Wall Street’ fame, the banking mantra does indeed appear to be ‘greed is good’. Indeed, the individualist form in which globalisation takes in the early 21st century with both great wealth and startling poverty and the interdependent yet interconnected paradox — still overall seems ‘less interested in the common good’ (Barak, 2015). The financial corporations have shunned Mill and Bentham’s science of morals (Mill, J. and Bentham, J., 2004) with the consequences of the bail outs ruining growth, development and the ‘social contract’ even of European nations (Oxfam, 2013, p. 1).
The financial institutions have surely taken advantage of the unwritten law and trust of the social contract. Globalisation ‘calls for a consideration of layers and layers of paradox’ (Findlay,1999, p. 225) — explaining the stunning benefits and major dark sides. One of the never-ending paradoxes globalisation seems to pitch is that many critical of excessive securitisation and centralised international law are, because of the devastation potential of unchecked crime among the elites, calling for stronger regulations against the dangers of the worst elements of human nature and greed demonstrated by the banks. Our tendencies towards greed as well as tendencies to cooperate (Newton, 2006, p. 23) are magnified by the opportunity for good and evil afforded to many with the immanence and opportunity of contemporary globalisation and the globalisation of crime, and in particular white-collar crime including large-scale money laundering. Since the advent of the mass use of computers in occupational settings in the 20th century opportunity for white-collar crime has become ubiquitous in corporate settings. In the US, this along with federal projects across the country has meant that federal government is the source of funding over many sectors and government programs have become a locust for financial fraud (Weisberg, D., Warring, E. and Chayet, E., 2001, p. 11).
The evidence of state collusion with powerful corporations appears to be real and obvious in the early 21st century Starbucks — one of the biggest and most popular coffee outlets in the world ‘paid just £8.6m in corporation tax in the UK over 14 years’ and this despite recording profits of £398 million (BBC, 2012). Tom Bergin’s special report for Reuters in 2012 explained the astonishing figures involved in nefarious state backed tax avoidance by one of the world’s biggest corporations, The Seattle-based group, with a market capitalization of $40 billion, is the second-largest restaurant or cafe chain globally after McDonald’s. Accounts filed by its UK subsidiary show that since it opened in the UK in 1998, the company has racked up over 3 billion pounds ($4.8 billion) in coffee sales, and opened 735 outlets but paid only 8.6 million pounds in income taxes, largely due because the taxman disallowed some deductions. The Reuters piece (Bergin, 2012) also explained Starbucks consistently reports vast profits to investors whilst reporting losses to the taxman (HMRC). The rules for supermassive corporations like Starbucks are not the same rules bestowed upon the small business owner in the UK. Many other similar contemporary reporting of this type involving the obvious state collusion with powerful corporations includes household names such as Google, e-bay, Amazon, Vodafone, British American Tobacco and many others (Brinded, 2013). Clearly, white-collar organised crime’s potential for the destruction of society, if aided by the state as it has been, is most worrying.
As I hope to have shown there is no doubt that many people in government and in everyday society still cannot get past the sense that white-collar crime is a crime of respectability that is taken far too lightly, the malpractice and sheer criminal banking policy that led to the financial crises of 2007/8 were not adequately punished as their acts have managed to escape ‘criminalisation and stigmatization that should come with these legal and illegal violations of both civil and human rights’ (Barak, 2016, p. 2). It is certainly so that the states refuse to regulate the often obviously damaging trading and LIBOR rigging etc. Experts and academics studying globalisation are beginning to realise just how destabilising crime is to global security and there is ambiguity whether the elites in states that suffer transnational organised crime are ‘preyed upon or are full partners in the mafia states’ (Levi, 2012 p. 42). Now it is quite apparent that there is collusion at the core of the financial corporations’ relationship with many nation states governments and it is often argued that these elite corporate companies have become out of the reach of the law (Fulcher, 2000, p. 2; Barak, 2016, p. 1). It is also true that in the first decade of the 21st century the institutional crimes committed by the financial corporations in the US and EU were indeed ‘committed with the assistance from the national deregulation of certain securities transactions that were previously criminal’ (Barak, 2016, p. 2–3).
Organised white-collar crime is easily pictured as an elite problem, a criminal act affecting the money markets and the economic arena only, but as I hope to have shown with my writing so far, it affects far more than its immediate world. White-collar crime is responsible for devastation within one of the most urgent contemporary issues facing humanity — the destruction of the environment. Natural resources are now fought over in all regions of the world by state forces and armed non-state forces — and transnational organised crime is causing destruction in the hope of profiteering in many regions in the world (UNEP, 2016). Organised criminal networks rarely confine themselves to one type of income market only, and white-collar criminals are drawn to profits gleaned from criminal networks ability to exploit states rich in mineral wealth, drug crops and natural resources. White-collar criminals are used by sophisticated networks to commit crimes including money laundering, tax fraud and forgery needed to squeeze out the profits often made possible by the plundering of the environment (UNEP, 2016, p. 65).
The heavier transnational organised criminal networks, experienced in white-collar crimes, also have embraced environmental crimes as an emerging black market with low risks and high profits. The crimes related to natural resources, waste and wildlife include tax fraud, double counting, transfer mispricing, money laundering, internet crimes and hacking, phishing/identity theft, securities fraud, financial crimes, and fraudulently reclaim carbon credits, as shown by some of the many examples investigated by INTERPOL and EUROPOL in recent years (UNEP, 2016, p. 65).
Dealing with organised white-collar crime and implementing the correct sanctions and punishments of those involved has proven difficult for global jurisprudence and multilateral agreement in an anarchic-centric international sense is obviously a challenge. ‘Crime and crime control offer the potential to conceal the edges and detail of difference through the establishment of symbolic borders of behavior, status and relationships easily manipulated by global politics’ (Findlay, 1999, p. 50). The issue of white-collar crime and its ability to obstruct justice has serious pedigree going back centuries in the US especially (Dervan, L. and Podger, E., 2016, p. 750) and there are plenty of signs it still has an imposing control over the law in many nations. Fraud on a large scale has been difficult to police as it has never been top of the agenda for many national governments and there is often confusion about which law body or agency deals with specific offenses which has been well-documented by the Office of Fair Trading in the UK and by Kane and Wall in the United States (Levi, 2012, p. 47). Just as already powerful nation states have grown in power within the modern world of digital and industrialised globalisation, so too have certain multinational corporations, and policing these behemoth companies is extremely difficult due to their enormous economic and political power (Barak, 2016, p. 1).
Transnational crime is no respecter of nation state law and flourishes especially in the financial sectors and international money laundering networks, as little can be done against this criminal enterprise with inefficient law environment measures at home at lower policing levels which can have ‘devastating consequences’ for the international community (Reichel, P., 2005, p. 239). The act of ‘money laundering… was not criminalised until 1986’ (Pontell, H. N. and Frid, A., 2000, p. 40; Viano, E., p. 189) and so it does not have preventative pedigree. Without a clear international consensus in dealing with it, nations have dealt with the increasing problem individually. In the 1990’s, the USA under the Clinton administration attempted to mitigate the problem with sanctions against nations they saw as weak in dealing with the issue — but true to the theory of state level corruption involving these crimes, those they chose to punish and those they did not depended on “political and economic motivations” (Reichel, P., 2005, p. 239). As mentioned, the tiny number of those arrested in the financial industries after the 2007/8 crash was hardly the clear up needed or deterrent for something similar to happen again. Even after all that has happened and the obvious destruction of white-collar crime, there seems to be only a system of monetary penalties in place for corporations that stray from the legal trading path in many nations, but this is often just viewed as another business expense by the perpetrators (Hanrahan, 2017, p. 67). Pressure needs to be put on states embracing transnational organised crime involving white-collar crime with various procedures involving isolating states and even implementing international sanctions (Levi, 2012). However, what is to be done and what will be done depends on the willingness of states and corporate elites and established order that profit from this malpractice and therein lies the problem.
Multilateral agreement on transnational crime would seem to be the most likely way to implement worthy deterrents on those wishing to profit from white-collar organised crime. The UN has made some progress toward this aim. In 2015, UN advisor Bruce Zagaris (2015) stated;
The United Nations has fundamentally changed the classic mode of international lawmaking by reshaping the negotiation and conclusion of treaties. International conventions no longer limit membership to state parties; they have grown to include international organizations such as the European Union. In the context of international white-collar crime, the UN’s changes to modern, multilateral treaty making encompass many aspects of transnational crime. In a given year, the UN holds approximately 3500 meetings and to date has participated in the conclusion of hundreds of multilateral agreements. (p. 521)
But as so often with transborder agreement on implementing such a multilateral policy, the thorny and controversial issue of international law inevitably rears its head. The world is far from having such an agreed definition on what necessarily is white-collar crime and what is organised crime and even individual nations sometimes do not always know which law enforcement institution to investigate these types of crimes (Hanrahan, 2017). This lack of cooperation has aided the hegemony of international corporates and made corruption on an international scale possible.
Major banks involvement in the act of money laundering for the international drug cartels has been widely reported and serious will to combat the problem does not appear to have been shown by governments of states affected by white-collar crime. Money laundering ‘involves the day-to-day, dollar-to-dollar flow of cash generated from drug sales’ (Viano, E., 1999, p. 189). Without this assistance from the major banks in legitimising funds made possible only through the most serious crimes, the drug trade and its temptations could not have the sway it does in the contemporary world. New policy is needed and academic authors and NGO’s have called for tougher action from the authorities presiding over nations suffering from nefarious banking practice including the money laundering for major criminal enterprise (Berney, E. and Viano, E., 1999, p. 178). Mass money laundering by HSBC is well-documented and unquestioned and has even had episodes devoted to the subject on Netflix and many major news reports on its blatant criminal activities, including a US investigation which led to the revelation that ‘in an 80-page document of court papers, the bank admits to almost going out of its way to act as a clearing house for international pariahs and drug dealers’ (CBS News, 2012). HSBC was revealed to have ‘funneled over 700 Billion Dollars of Mexican drug cartel money through the bank’ — which led to no arrests. (CBS News, 2012). There is clearly an issue here that should not be ignored — despite the ‘respectability’ of professions involved in these misdemeanors. That HSBC took part in a criminal scheme ‘that was adopted as a policy’ (CBS News, 2012) and no arrests were made cannot fail to illuminate a state (the USA) as colluding in some way with international corporations (HSBC a UK company) heavily involved in money laundering for major criminal networks.
Advantages and control the powerful enjoy are often but not always obvious although certainly felt by all (Gottschalk, P. and Gunnesdal, L., 2018, p. 2). Society in general needs to move on from perceiving white-collar crime as something esoteric and not of their world — the ‘position and trust enjoyed by the offender in an occupational setting’ (Shapiro,1987, p. 93) needs to be re-evaluated and the broad and shocking consequences of organised white-collar crime need to be illuminated in the conscience mind as well as the deep conscience mind of humanity before it can do any more damage. There is some evidence that people are waking up to the true universal effects of organised, large-scale, white-collar crime. Public anger in the US over economic consequences of the criminal enterprise has generated pressure for tougher criminal justice and regulatory responses to the alleged abuses in London and Wall Street (Levi, 2012, p. 47), but the level of public anger, thanks to a lack of understanding of the seriousness of white-collar organised crime is not commensurate to the damage that has been done. It should be clear that whether you are a globalist or have more traditional values it has become patently obvious that the system of corporate governance that is emerging in the 21st century is not something representing the collective good and is failing in many instances (Toynbee, P. and Walker, D., 2009, p. 209).The bank bailouts have shown it would seem that the public state now insures the private state and not the other way around in many parts of the world, including the USA and major European states. Without serious change and wide scale understanding of how serious that could be not only to democracy but also to the very security of the world, the danger will continue and the potential for catastrophe will remain.
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