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Crime Law Soc Change (2009) 52:932
DOI 10.1007/s10611-008-9174-9
Published online: 26 November 2008# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2008
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 1886
Introduction
Money laundering, the process in which assets obtained or generated by criminal activity are moved or concealed to obscure their link with the crime [12], has increasingly received attention during the last 20 years, from both policy makers and international organisations. This criminal phenomenon is depictedfirst by the US, but followed by European countriesas a major threat to society and its economy. As a result, the battle against money laundering has become an international priority andas some claima convenient motive for policymakers to implement far-reaching regulations and guidelines. This battle not only focuses on the prevention of money laundering as a crime in itself, but is also used as a means to identify the perpetrators of predicate crimes being the origin of the crime-monies to be laundered.
In the fight against profit-oriented crime and money laundering a large number of actors are involved, working on the prevention and detection of money launderers, based on a system in which public and private institutions on a national and international level cooperate. Prevention, detection and reporting are carried out by private partners, while the public partners have an analytic and repressive task. As a result of these international and national initiatives that were taken in the fight against organised crime and money laundering, we are currently witnessing the development of two parallel angles around the fight on money laundering and its
A. Verhage (*)
Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Research Group Social Analysis of Security, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgiume-mail: [email protected]
Between the hammer and the anvil? The anti-money laundering-complex and its interactionswith the compliance industry
Antoinette Verhage
10 A. Verhage
predicate crimes: a legislative, regulative angle, designed to prevent and detect money laundering on the one hand, and an intrinsic commercial position towards anti-money laundering, stemming from a self-protecting reflex by financial institutions, aspiring to protect themselves against regulatory and reputational risks. These developments will be referred to respectively as the anti-money laundering (AML)-complex and...