Money laundering and capital flight

Abstract

India's capitalism is incompletely described when the account does not include the laundering of wealth: its concealment in other business, including its flight from India's jurisdiction in order to separate the surplus extracted from the gaze of labour. Many countries from which there is capital flight, whether Russia, Pakistan, Nigeria or India, are weak jurisdictions, in even the nominally egalitarian enforcement of law, and therefore weak in resisting the ability of the powerful to export their wealth. Laundered funds often originate in legitimate business, such as any manufacturing or trading activity that seeks to evade the taxes levied on earnings by governments. It is such funds that are the bulk of the business of laundering money, and of global unreported or misreported flows. The UK Parliament's Justice Committee's Report is characterized by a similar remoteness from any concern about the laundering of money and accordingly also seeks to maintain the fiction of independence for the Crown Dependencies.