Powerful legal and financial services enable kleptocracy, research shows

(Press-News.org)  

Powerful legal and financial service industries are enabling kleptocracy and corrupt elites to operate with relative impunity, a new study shows.

The research details how “enablers” from these industries exploit deregulation and the under-enforcement of the law to game the system. They can offshore their clients' wealth, and enhance their reputations and influence via philanthropy, political donations, and the use of the UK's punitive libel regime.

Most of this “enabling” is likely to be non-criminal, given the very few convictions despite the widely acknowledged extent of kleptocracy. These services —or professional indulgences— also include the explaining of kleptocratic sources of wealth and concealing of ownership.

Indulging kleptocracy: British Service Providers, Postcommunist Elites, and the Enabling of Corruption, by John Heathershaw, Tena Prelec, and Tom Mayne, outlines how kleptocracy is creating moral and economic problems. It impoverishes the global south and undermines institutions in the global north, eroding faith in democracy by empowering corrupt elite business-political networks in global politics.

Professor Heathershaw said: “Kleptocracy requires help – enabling - from legal and financial professionals. This can be licit and illicit, willingly complicit, negligence or deliberate corruption. It is important to shed light on dangerous patterns of corruption, break the system of indulgences and stymie the globalization of kleptocracy.”

The book outlines the important relationship between illicit (all that which is criminal, unethical, and noncompliant) and the licit (all that which is lawful, ethical, and compliant according to professional standards) because those in services “cross the frontier” at the wishes of their clients. It is at this boundary of il/ licit that the bulk of work is done. The book explains the impact of the emergence of these blurred boundaries and network ties.

Professor Heathershaw said: “The UK has become an entrepôt for the corrupt and a market for short-term capital.”

The book contains nine case studies of corruption and kleptocracy, and each of these contains a variety of professional service providers. It outlines the historical and contemporary political context of the UK’s kleptocracy problem in which demand for its enabling services has emerged.

The researchers have previously published a database which contains 99 cases of property purchases worth more than £2 billion and made over the period from 1998 to 2020 on behalf of the elites of Russian and Eurasian states. All have completed residential real estate transactions in the UK, many using complex offshore structures to conceal either uncertain beneficial ownership or dubious sources of wealth.

The book shows there are three mechanisms of transnational kleptocracy—incumbency, alliance, and
enabling. While incumbency and alliance both matter for certain indulgences such as explaining away suspicious wealth and avoiding the threat of individual sanctions, these are less powerful than the enabler effect.

 

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