Financial Transparency Coalition

In the coming days, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) will face a clear-cut choice: to move closer to ending financial secrecy, or to stagnate within the current system of opacity. The specific issue at hand is whether corporations should be required to disclose beneficial ownership information, which identifies who actually owns a company. The

Just last month, the European Parliament took a step towards genuine financial transparency, by passing a committee vote that would require centralized registers of the beneficial owners of all companies in the European Union.

Victor Yanukovych lives on 340 acres of land on the banks of the river Dnieper in Ukraine. His home, a five story mansion named Mezhyhiriya, is decorated with marble, crystal, and precious woods. It is difficult to overstate the luxury of this palatial building. Its cedar doors are worth $64,000 each, the wall paneling in

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Justice Department has indicated it will step up its enforcement of anti-money laundering (AML) rules among financial institutions and boost its efforts to safeguard U.S. banks from illicit financial flows. As the article points out, this comes as no surprise to those of us who have watched this issue—prosecutors in the United States have been bringing more cases against banks using the Banking Secrecy Act and DOJ has aggressively pursued both domestic and international banks for deficient money laundering controls. The DOJ’s efforts are laudable, but unfortunately they expose a...