Abstract
Globalization and technology have raised a complete new prospective of trade and finance flows across the globe. Money laundering is one of the biggest obstacles for creating a safe and effective operating international financial system. It is considered now the third largest “business” in the word and has very deep political and economic implications. Unfortunately money laundering is more then only that, and the reasons why, would be modestly explored by this article. This article approach to money laundering will be from a different prospective, and will try to go to the core of the theoretical understanding, for then trying to explore and give suggestions for the practical issues as they have been argued by many scholars, legal and financial experts. This article will try to understand better money laundering by addressing common aspects with other three theories, that among the others, I find particularly interesting because they share common or diametrically opposite elements. The legislator in money laundering was worried by criminalizing this offense not only because of the moral blameworthiness or the harm caused by looking in the past, for what it relates to the underlying offense and its danger, but mostly for the future fear of generating criminality and further wrongful conducts and harm. Preventing further criminality meets perfectly with all consequentialist reasons of imposing punishment. This view of money laundering as a “harm generator” or “wrongness generator”, is the most convincing about the real reasons of criminalization. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n3p285
Highlights
I believe that the wrongfulness of money laundering in itself without trying to associate this offense with something else is one of the most difficult questions
What kind of behavior can be punished? How severely? What justifies punishment? The simple model of retributivism subsequently means that a person can be punished only when he did voluntarily something morally wrong, that this punishment must be in some way equal, or equivalent to the atrocity of his crime and that justification of punishment consists in the fact that punishment is a negative response to the offender doing something morally wrong”, (Hart: 2008)
The second layer, the money laundering offense includes, as a simple example, opening a travel agency and producing fake invoices in addition to the real ones for the clients, so that the amount declared to the IRS, as a profit from this business, includes the real money profited from the clients and the illegal funds profited by non-existing clients, that in this case is the drug provided cash
Summary
I believe that the wrongfulness of money laundering in itself without trying to associate this offense with something else is one of the most difficult questions. The second premise to take into consideration, to better understand the way that the follow theories are constructed, is by dividing money laundering in two separate distinctive layers. The first layer is the illegal, unlawful offense that generates the money, or differently the source which produces the funds to be laundered. The second layer, the money laundering offense includes, as a simple example, opening a travel agency and producing fake invoices in addition to the real ones for the clients, so that the amount declared to the IRS, as a profit from this business, includes the real money profited from the clients and the illegal funds profited by non-existing clients, that in this case is the drug provided cash.
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