Financial investigations are critical to proving crimes such as corruption, fraud and trafficking in humans or illicit goods. They are also central to confiscating illegally obtained assets from criminals – so that crime doesn’t pay. 

Yet there is often confusion about who performs financial investigations, how, when and why, as well as their relationship to criminal investigations. All of these questions are further complicated by the fact that different countries have different legal systems, different laws and different terminology. 

This quick guide by Phyllis Atkinson looks at how criminals manipulate and misuse corporate vehicles in offshore jurisdictions to launder money. It focuses on the meaning of "corporate vehicle" and "offshore" and other related concepts such as beneficial ownership. It also gives an example of how a trust, which is one common type of corporate vehicle in the vast "offshore ecosystem", can be used for illicit purposes. 

“Follow the money!” Everyone’s talking about it, especially in relation to corruption, fraud and organised crime.

What does “following money” actually mean in this context? How do we do it in practice? And what are some of the wider possibilities?

Read this quick guide by Stephen Ratcliffe, Senior Investigation Specialist, to find out.

Recovering criminals’ ill-gotten assets, i.e. confiscating property, cars, yachts, cash and other funds gained through corruption or other acquisitive crimes, is a big topic in law enforcement. Among other benefits, asset recovery acts as a deterrent against crime and makes a clear public statement that illicit wealth will be targeted and returned to the public treasury.

In this quick guide, Phill Jones, former Senior Investigation / Asset Recovery Specialist, sets out some fundamental investigative skills that will help investigators trace even the most cleverly hidden assets.

Every day, an unknown number of elephant tusks, rhino horn, pangolin scales and other wildlife products – alive and dead – cross the oceans in container ships and cargo flights for use in traditional medicine, crafts and the illegal pet trade. Rare trees are felled in ancient forests and shipped out under false certificates.

They leave behind the butchered carcasses of the last remaining animals of many species, scarred and emptied landscapes, legal livelihoods undermined by corruption and criminal activity, and communities ravaged by organised crime networks.

Given the vast dimensions of the multibillion-dollar illegal wildlife trade (IWT), it may be surprising that until recently, global efforts to tackle IWT came mainly from the conservation sector. This has typically consisted of numerous donor-funded efforts to catch poachers and raise public awareness of the plight of endangered species.

Valuable as those efforts are, they do little to impact the organised crime networks, corruption and illicit financial flows that allow the lucrative illegal trade in wildlife products to continue.

High-profile law enforcement operations against illegal wildlife trade (IWT), such as Interpol’s Operation Thunderball in July and the arrest of notorious trafficker Moazu Kromah in Uganda in June 2019, have drawn welcome attention to IWT as a financial and organised crime and not only a conservation issue.

Yet in working to strengthen legal frameworks and law enforcement capacity in countries that suffer from high levels of IWT, we must not forget the social drivers and facilitators behind wildlife trafficking – factors that laws alone are powerless to change.