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Comment by exbanker | Hacker News Reader

The biggest money launderers are close to those who write the AML policies.

One of the most significant money launderers is a famous attorney from Shearman and Sterling in NYC.

From my experience, prominent financial executives attempted to engage in blatant laundering of drug money in BVI. These individuals were connected to the attorney and one is a public official appointed by 4 US Presidents.

This was 20+ years ago and I don’t know what they actually did, but I was in the room when they tried to do it. Outside the room hung a giant photo of George W. Bush golfing with the firm’s CEO.

They offered me $1 million in cash to fly with $100m at a time to Tortola. The financial structure was created by the attorney.

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Thanks to the Wikileaks effect of the internet (rapid info declassification + sharing) more corruption is able to be exposed, and the scale is shocking and enormous.

The hardest part is then trying to change a known-to-be-corrupt system, when those who write the rules always do so in their favour.

Here in Australia we have slid into the bottom 10 percent of global corruption index [0]

Politicians, lawyers, accountants, and realestate agents have conspired to repeatedly prevent AML from being introduced to Australia since 2002.

Whistleblowers get threatened with life-destroying jail terms.

Politicians "retire" then take up cushy directorships with numerous companies they previously wrote seemingly treasonous laws for (dozens of slap-in-the-face-blatant corruption yet it continues on with impunity or any punishment except for maybe losing an election or a gravy train contract).

[0] https://www.transparency.org/en/blog/cpi-2021-corruption-wat...

Source shows the opposite: although Australia is declining in the rankings, it remains in the top 10% of least corrupt countries.

Thanks you are correct and I will fact check my posts a bit more next time.

I thought our last 15 years of politicians were massively unaccountable and corrupted by self-created taxpayer slush funds plus lobbyist megabucks, corporate kickbacks and post-politics directorships.

I suppose politicians everywhere are essentially driven by the same human frailties, yet mostly worse than what I am seeing locally!

I'm reminded of something some newcomer to DC said about corruption:

"What's shocking is not the illegality going on. What's shocking is what's legal. "

Like, they offered you $1MM (clean) to put $100MM cash in a suitcase and smuggle it through customs? Or to babysit it on a chartered flight and claim it was yours at customs? Because those feel pretty different.

I doubt the $1M in cash was in any way clean.

I assumed they were offering him clean cash. Maybe it was a "just help yourself to 1% of the bag". At any rate, the perk of working for money launderers and literally depositing the dirty money is you should be able to do the exact same strategy with your million.

$1M in cash is never clean without a credible narrative attached to it, backed up by a paper trail.

> They offered me $1 million in cash to fly with $100m at a time to Tortola.

Dump the cash out of the airplane on the way and claim it never happened.

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