Two recent EU publications underscore the central role of corruption and money laundering in enabling organised crime and threatening security – and how essential it is to invest more in efforts to investigate, seize and confiscate criminal assets.
Europol’s 2025 Serious and Organised Crime Threat Assessment (SOCTA) painted a sobering picture of how organised crime is “evolving at an unprecedented pace”, with corruption and money laundering as key enablers.
Corruption affects communities worldwide. It undermines civil, political and economic rights, erodes trust in institutions and impedes economic progress. A new Policy Brief by the FALCON (Fight Against Large-scale Corruption and Organised Crime Networks) project unveils new insights in the fight against high-level corruption.
Border corruption – defined simply as an illegal exchange between border officials and private actors – is a complex phenomenon with serious impacts on safety, health and security. And stopping it isn’t as easy as just stepping up enforcement.
How does corruption threaten national and international security, both directly and indirectly? Can viewing it through the lens of power offer deeper insights? And what might we achieve by framing corruption as a security concern?
This quick guide gives a short introduction to this complex issue as part of a two-part series on corruption, security and strategic corruption.
This Working Paper explores the wide variety of non-conviction based (NCB) forfeiture laws in Latin America, with a special focus on the region’s predominant model, Extinción de dominio.
It argues that NCB forfeiture legislation, which allows for the recovery of stolen assets outside of criminal proceedings, can contribute significantly to a state’s criminal policy response to rampant economic and organised crime.
Actors in grand corruption schemes often conspire and deliberately create sophisticated networks to extract huge amounts of public resources from government systems. They hide such conspiracies behind hybrid formal/informal arrangements.
The 6th Global Conference on Criminal Finances and Cryptocurrencies (#6CRC) – a two-day gathering of thousands of crypto specialists and financial investigators from law enforcement, regulators and the private sector – came to an end today at Europol’s headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands.
As cryptocurrency use expands into practically every country and sector, so does its abuse to commit new forms of crime and launder dirty money, said speakers.
The paper targets the nexus between corruption and money laundering. Scholars and practitioners recently observed how offshore financial centers and financial infrastructures have become central in facilitating corruption and other criminal activities.
Offshore vehicles often serve to conceal the connections between business people and politically exposed persons. Secrecy jurisdictions and service providers have emerged as key actors in these illicit schemes.
The paper explores the following questions:
This policy brief explains how intelligence practitioners within law enforcement authorities and researchers skilled in social network analysis (SNA) can and should cooperate better in the fight against illegal wildlife trade (IWT).
When you have a difficult problem to solve, it often helps to look at it from a different angle. And it always helps to collaborate with experts who have different perspectives and skillsets.