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INTRODUCTION
Money laundering repression and asset recovery are tools that share a very relevant preventive–general role. Both institutions from Criminal Law seek to inhibit the monetary stimulus to commit offenses. The former does so by hampering the flow of earnings from illicit sources, and the latter by seizing the earnings from their beneficiaries. These interlinked goals prove to be most useful from a criminal policy standpoint in the fight against organized crime since they are oriented to the economic disabling of their agents, blockading their financial movement and depriving them of the profits thus generated. Sarrabayrouse (2013:60) has written:
I say this because the asset laundering process is the fundamental instrument employed by organized crime to legitimize illicit profits earned by them by perpetuating these serious felonies. Thus, a policy aimed to recover these illicit earnings is one of the chief goals, since the biggest blow which can be done to criminal groups is precisely at their economic power.
In attacking the financing of criminal organizations, the aim is to hamper the availability of funds sought as dividends and reinvested into new criminal enterprises and their coverage (logistics, bribes, covering schemes). Funds handled by these groups “… are able to condition the macroeconomic parameters of a nation. Transnational criminal organizations, thus named by their transnational essence, even make earnings higher than the GNP [gross national product] of several developed countries from narcotics trafficking alone.” (Abel Souto 2001:42) Now,
… this phenomenological view which might be highly interesting for a sociological or criminal science analysis of the issue, sometimes poses a series of problems to legal operators which must interpret the law in order to ascertain their objective limits, since most legal systems, when regulating and defining a whitewashing criminal type do not consider within the typification these elements (an international or transnational component, organized crime, large sums of money involved), thus allowing cases of various sizes to be punished (small, medium, large) as well as cases which … are not linked to any organized criminal activity. (Náquira and Rosenblut 2018)
Legal rules preventing and fighting money laundering and those that regulate asset recovery mechanisms in various forms are complementary to each other, even symbiotic. It would be to no avail to put obstacles to the...