The aid agency USAid supported anti-corruption groups and investigative journalists in dozens of countries; the White House’s Task Force KleptoCapture and the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative led western efforts to find wealth owned by the Kremlin or its allies; the Foreign Agents Registration Act brought transparency to who was funding US lobbyists; the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force sought to unearth infiltration by the Kremlin and other regimes.
David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has made fighting corruption central to his time in office, and the UK needs to step up where the US is stepping back, not least to push back against the inevitable demands from Trump’s allies in Europe that we follow his lead.
It invented the idea of fighting money laundering; its sanctions against Kremlin elites went further and faster than European equivalents; its prosecutions against money laundering by banks, crypto exchanges and others have been more ambitious than ours; its indictments against corrupt foreign officials have achieved better results.
Groups like the Anti-Corruption Action Centre in Kyiv do crucial work pushing for new standards in the battle against bribery in Ukraine; networks like the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project do indispensable journalistic work investigating the misdeeds of the rich and crooked in eastern Europe.
In the decades when the US was prosecuting its companies for paying bribes abroad, the UK was establishing a network of tax havens, and selling anonymous shell companies, so as to profit from their corruption.
.jpeg?trim=312,0,313,0&quality=75&auto=webp&width=1000)
