Onions, potatoes, soft fruit, luxury cars, expensive watches . . . it reads like a list of goods held up at the Channel crossing in the UK’s pre-Christmas travel chaos. But it is a sample of some of the exports that feature in a longer-term worry for global companies: trade-based money laundering.
At the start of December, the Financial Action Task Force — the intergovernmental watchdog for financial crime and terrorist financing — issued a new report on TBML, citing cases involving all of those exports. Its president, Marcus Pleyer, declined to speculate whether this method of transmitting crime proceeds — distinct from interbank money laundering and physical cash couriering — was now in greater use. He referred only to the sums that can be laundered through sham trade deals: “One criminal network using TBML was able to move $400m over several years,” he said.
But days later, the UK Treasury and Home Office were a lot less cautious. In their…