Financial Transparency Coalition

Thank you to the Center for Complex Operations and the State Department for providing me with an opportunity to speak to you here today. I have been asked to present on this particular panel because my organization, Global Financial Integrity, attempts to quantify illicit capital flight leaving developing countries and find ways to curtail that illicit capital flight. Our definition of illicit capital flight is where the movement of money is breaking laws in either the country of original, a country of transit or the destination country. We look at how the international financial system facilitates, and indeed...

Former Wachovia Bank Anti Money-Laundering Officer, Martin Woods, discusses how Wachovia, Bank of America, and other large banking institutions sustain Mexican drug cartels. Woods left his position at Wachovia due to negative responses from Wachovia officials to Woods’ investigations of Mexican cartel money laundering within the institution.

This wasn’t meant to happen in the last decade. Money laundering regulation was meant to have stopped the handling of drug cash in the USA. The Patriot Act was meant to have closed down such things. The FATF 49 recommendations were meant to have been in place. But as the Observer reported yesterday, US bank Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo, money laundered hundreds of billions for Mexican drug gangs in the USA. And, when the activity was questioned internally from London, the money laundering officer who did so was driven out.

As the violence spread, billions of dollars of cartel cash began to seep into the global financial system. But a special investigation by the Observer reveals how the increasingly frantic warnings of one London whistleblower were ignored