【每日英语文章】反洗钱

发布于 2021-04-18 10:08 ，所属分类：知识学习综合资讯

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选自《The Economist》

ECONOMIST:The war against money-laundering is being lost

经济学人：反洗钱战争正在失败

The global system for financial crime is hugely expensive and largely ineffective

针对金融犯罪的全球体系耗资巨大，且基本无效

YET ANOTHER bank is preparing to face the music over alleged failings in its efforts to curb flows of dirty money. In the coming weeks NatWest, one of Britain’s largest lenders, is set to appear in court in London to respond to charges that it failed to properly scrutinise a gold-dealing client that deposited £365m ($502m) with the bank—£264m of it in cash.

如今，另一家银行正准备接受指控，称其在遏制黑钱流动方面存在失误。未来几周，英国最大的银行之一NatWest将在伦敦出庭，对其未能对一名黄金交易客户进行适当审查的指控做出回应。该客户向该银行存入了3.65亿英镑(5.02亿美元)，其中2.64亿英镑为现金。

NatWest (which has said it is co-operating with the investigation) is the latest in a long line of banks to be accused of falling short in the fight against dirty money. Last year global lenders were hit with $10.4bn in penalties for money-laundering violations, an increase of more than 80% on 2019, according to Fenergo, a compliance-software firm. In January Capital One, an American bank, was fined $390m for failing to report thousands of suspicious transactions. Danske Bank is still dealing with the fallout of a scandal that erupted in 2018. Over $200bn of potentially dirty money was washed through the Danish lender’s small Estonian branch while executives missed or ignored a sea of red flags.

NatWest(已表示配合调查)是一长串被指控在打击黑钱的斗争中表现不佳的银行中的最新一家。根据合规软件公司Fenergo的数据，去年全球银行因洗钱违规被罚款104亿美元，比2019年增加了80%以上。今年1月，美国银行资本一号因未能报告数千起可疑交易而被罚款3.9亿美元。丹斯克银行仍在处理2018年爆发的丑闻的后果。超过2000亿美元的潜在黑钱通过这家丹麦银行在爱沙尼亚的小分支机构被清洗，而高管们却忽略了一片危险信号。

These cases suggest that banks remain the Achilles heel in the global war on money-laundering, despite the reams of regulations aimed at turning them into frontline soldiers in that conflict. However, closer examination suggests that the global anti-money-laundering (AML) system has serious structural flaws, largely because governments have outsourced to the private sector much of the policing they should have been doing themselves. A study published last year by Ronald Pol, a financial-crime expert, concluded that the global AML system could be “the world’s least effective policy experiment”, and that compliance costs for banks and other businesses could be more than 100 times higher than the amount of laundered loot seized.

这些案例表明，银行仍然是全球反洗钱战争中的致命弱点，尽管有大量法规旨在将银行变成这场冲突的前线士兵。然而，更仔细的研究表明，全球反洗钱(AML)体系存在严重的结构性缺陷，主要是因为政府将本应由自己负责的大部分监管工作外包给了私营部门。金融犯罪专家罗纳德·波尔(Ronald Pol)去年发表的一项研究得出结论，全球反洗钱系统可能是“世界上最低效的政策实验”，银行和其他企业的合规成本可能是被清洗赃物数量的100多倍。

Red-tape revolution

官僚革命

Money-laundering was not even a crime across much of the world until the 1980s. Since then countries from Afghanistan to Zambia have been arm-twisted, particularly by America, into passing laws. This effort intensified after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001 and the passage of America’s Patriot Act, which targeted the money trails of those financing terrorists and other criminals.

直到20世纪80年代，洗钱在世界大部分地区都不是犯罪。从那时起，从阿富汗到赞比亚的国家都被迫通过法律，尤其是美国。这一努力在2001年9/11恐怖袭击和美国爱国者法案通过后得到加强，该法案针对的是资助恐怖分子和其他犯罪分子的资金来源。

This has turned AML compliance into a huge part of what banks do and created large new bureaucracies. It is not unusual for firms such as HSBC or JPMorgan Chase to have 3,000-5,000 specialists focused on fighting financial crime, and more than 20,000 overall in risk and compliance.

这使得反洗钱合规成为银行工作的重要组成部分，并催生了新的大型官僚机构。汇丰银行(HSBC)或摩根大通(JPMorgan Chase)等公司拥有3000至5000名专注于打击金融犯罪的专家，以及20000多名风险和合规专家，这并不罕见。

The AML push has succeeded in stamping out the most pernicious practices, such as using shell banks (those with no real customers) in sunny places to launder suitcases stuffed with drug money. But criminals haven’t been forced to get particularly creative: it is not much more difficult today than it was 20 years ago to rinse dirty money by setting up a shell company, disguising the loot flowing through it as legitimate revenue and persuading an established bank to process it.

反洗钱运动成功地根除了最有害的做法，比如利用阳光充足的地方的空壳银行(那些没有真正客户的银行)清洗装满毒品钱的手提箱。但犯罪分子并没有被迫变得特别有创造力:如今，通过成立一家空壳公司、将流经空壳公司的赃物伪装成合法收入并说服一家老牌银行处理这些赃物，来清洗黑钱并不比20年前困难多少。

As a result, the numbers tell of a war being lost. The “Global Threat Assessment”, a report by John Cusack, an ex-chair of the Wolfsberg Group, an association of banks that helps develop AML standards, estimates that $5.8trn-worth of financial crime was perpetrated in 2018—equivalent to 6.7% of global GDP. Statistics on how much is intercepted by authorities are patchy. A decade-old estimate by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime put it at just 0.2% of the total. In 2016 Europol estimated the confiscation rate in Europe to be a higher but still paltry 1.1%.

因此，这些数字表明一场战争正在失败。沃尔夫斯堡集团是一个帮助制定反洗钱标准的银行协会，其前主席约翰·库萨克的报告《全球威胁评估》估计，2018年发生了价值5.8万亿美元的金融犯罪，相当于全球国内生产总值的6.7%。关于有多少被当局截获的统计数据是不完整的。联合国毒品和犯罪办公室十年前的估计仅占总数的0.2%。2016年，欧洲刑警组织估计欧洲的没收率较高，但仍仅为1.1%。

Some experts think the success rate may have fallen in recent years, in part because of the rise of “trade-based money-laundering”—which moves dodgy money into the legitimate economy by playing tricks with paperwork for cross-border trade. The covid-19 pandemic, too, has boosted opportunities for financial ne’er-do-wells. Criminals have set up shell companies to exploit vast, poorly policed government-aid schemes. In Britain, the authorities have received more than 50,000 reports of potential misuse of its “Bounce Back Loans” and furlough schemes.

一些专家认为，近年来成功率可能有所下降，部分原因是“基于贸易的洗钱”的上升——这种行为通过玩弄跨境贸易的文书工作，将不良资金转移到合法经济中。新冠肺炎大流行也增加了富人的金融机会。犯罪分子建立了空壳公司来利用庞大的、监管不力的政府援助计划。在英国，当局已经收到了超过50，000份关于潜在滥用其“反弹贷款”和休假计划的报告。

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the intergovernmental body that sets global AML standards, admits to problems with the system. Last October its president, Marcus Pleyer, sounded an exasperated note, accusing the “vast majority” of countries of failing to tackle money-laundering. Some countries have been able to achieve solid marks in the organisation’s assessments by passing nice-looking AML laws, only to water them down later, or fail to implement key provisions. One offender is the United Arab Emirates, where weak enforcement has helped Dubai become a haven for corrupt capital. But America and Britain also look to game the FATF process, albeit less egregiously.

制定全球反洗钱标准的政府间机构——金融行动特别工作组(FATF)承认该体系存在问题。去年10月，其总裁马库斯·普莱尔(Marcus Pleyer)发出了愤怒的声音，指责“绝大多数”国家未能解决洗钱问题。一些国家通过了漂亮的反洗钱法律，在该组织的评估中取得了良好的成绩，但后来却淡化了这些法律，或者未能执行关键条款。一个违规者是阿拉伯联合酋长国，该国执法不力已帮助迪拜成为腐败资本的天堂。但是美国和英国也希望在FATF进程中博弈，尽管不那么过分。

Global efforts to stamp out money-laundering have, if anything, waned over the past five years, says Robert Barrington, a professor of anti-corruption practice at the University of Sussex. In 2016 David Cameron, Britain’s then prime minister, hosted a global anti-corruption summit, and other governments queued up to back the cause. But it proved a false dawn. Britain became distracted by Brexit. In America, President Donald Trump showed scant leadership on the issue. Russia and China have stymied efforts to co-ordinate global anti-corruption efforts.

苏塞克斯大学反腐败实践教授罗伯特·巴林顿说，在过去的五年里，全球打击洗钱的努力已经减弱。2016年，时任英国首相大卫·卡梅伦主持了一次全球反腐败峰会，其他政府排队支持这项事业。但事实证明这是一个虚假的黎明。英国被英国退出欧盟分散了注意力。在美国，唐纳德·特朗普总统在这个问题上缺乏领导力。俄罗斯和中国阻碍了协调全球反腐败努力的努力。

Three big problems hobble the fight against financial crime: a lack of transparency; a lack of collaboration; and a lack of resources. Start with transparency. Investigators can struggle to identify the real, “beneficial”, owners of shell companies, who often hide behind legal nominees.

三大问题阻碍了打击金融犯罪的斗争:缺乏透明度；缺乏合作；和缺乏资源。先说透明度。调查人员可能很难确定空壳公司真正的“受益”所有者，他们经常躲在合法的被提名者背后。

Some progress has been made in increasing visibility. Britain launched a public register of company owners in 2016, spurring several others to follow suit. Britain’s offshore satellites, such as the British Virgin Islands and Jersey, have been arm-twisted into setting up registers or strengthening existing ones. Late last year American lawmakers passed a law requiring ownership data on firms registered at state level, including in Delaware’s incorporation factories, to be held in a federal register.

在提高可见度方面取得了一些进展。英国在2016年推出了公司所有者公共登记册，促使其他几个国家效仿。英国的离岸卫星，如英属维尔京群岛和泽西岛，已经被迫建立注册或加强现有的。去年年底，美国立法者通过了一项法律，要求在州一级注册的公司的所有权数据，包括特拉华州的公司工厂，必须在联邦登记册中保存。

However, many countries still eschew registers, and those that have them have encountered problems. In Britain, for instance, criminals have been willing to risk filing false information, or none at all, given the modest penalties for doing so. Hong Kong, meanwhile, plans to scale back the details company owners must disclose on its register.

然而，许多国家仍然回避登记册，那些拥有登记册的国家遇到了问题。例如，在英国，犯罪分子愿意冒着提交虚假信息的风险，或者根本不提交信息，因为这样做会受到适度的惩罚。与此同时，香港计划缩减公司所有者必须在其登记册上披露的细节。

The FATF is reviewing its standard on beneficial-ownership transparency with a view to making it tougher; the current version says merely that “competent authorities” should have access to such information “in a timely fashion”. But getting its 39 core members—from America and the EU to China and Russia—to agree on a new text will be difficult.

FATF正在审查其受益所有权透明度标准，以期使其更加严格；目前的版本只是说“主管当局”应该“及时”获得这种信息。但是让它的39个核心成员——从美国和欧盟到中国和俄罗斯——就新的文本达成一致将是困难的。

The second problem, lack of collaboration, hobbles governments’ work with each other, and with banks on the front line. The big money-laundering schemes are sophisticated and transnational, while anti-laundering efforts remain balkanised. Information-sharing between governments is improving, thanks to co-operation among “financial-intelligence units”, national centres that collect data on suspicious transactions. But the “mutual legal assistance” system, which countries investigating crimes use to request information from each other, is clunky.

第二个问题，缺乏合作，阻碍了政府之间的合作，以及与前线银行的合作。大型洗钱计划是复杂的、跨国的，而反洗钱努力仍然停滞不前。由于收集可疑交易数据的国家中心“金融情报机构”之间的合作，政府间的信息共享正在改善。但是调查犯罪的国家用来相互请求信息的“司法协助”系统是笨拙的。

As for data flowing to and from banks, the benefits of sharing are indisputable. “The value of information coming from a network of banks is thousands of times higher than the information any one bank has, because you can see not just where the money came from, but where it went, and where it went from there, and so on. It gives you a picture of the network,” says the head of a large international bank. Unfortunately, the level of collaboration is “terrible”. America does best, thanks to the Patriot Act, but even there information-sharing is “on a tiny scale”, with anything more requiring a warrant from a judge, “which is hard if you don’t know what the crime is yet”. Britain is in second place, he says, with “about 30%” of the data-sharing done in America. And in third place? “No one.”

至于往来银行的数据，共享的好处是毋庸置疑的。“来自银行网络的信息的价值比任何一家银行拥有的信息都高几千倍，因为你不仅可以看到钱从哪里来，还可以看到钱去了哪里，从哪里去了哪里，等等。一家大型国际银行的负责人表示。遗憾的是，协作的水平“很糟糕”。多亏了《爱国者法案》，美国做得最好，但即使在那里，信息共享也是“小范围的”，任何事情都需要法官的授权，“如果你还不知道罪行是什么，那就很难了”。他说，英国位居第二，美国的数据共享“约占30%”。第三名呢？“没人。”

A daunting obstacle to sharing information is data-privacy laws, which in many countries prevent banks from passing information to authorities, particularly those in other countries. Some big banks have lobbied for exceptions to be made for AML, but “governments don’t see it as a legislative priority”, says an executive at another bank.

共享信息的一个令人生畏的障碍是数据隐私法，在许多国家，该法禁止银行向当局传递信息，尤其是在其他国家。另一家银行的一名高管表示，一些大银行已经游说要求对反洗钱做出例外规定，但“政府并不认为这是立法优先事项”。

The third difficulty, a dearth of resources, stems from the fact that white-collar crime is less visible than violent crime. Spending on curbing the latter goes down better with the public. In Britain, fraud makes up more than a third of reported crime, yet gets less than 1% of police resources in terms of officers. Banks can spend all they like on AML, but the criminals won’t end up in court if governments fail to invest in policing and prosecution.

第三个困难是资源匮乏，这是因为白领犯罪比暴力犯罪更不明显。抑制后者的支出在公众中下降得更好。在英国，诈骗占报告犯罪的三分之一以上，但就警官而言，诈骗只占警察资源的不到1%。银行可以在反洗钱上随心所欲地花钱，但如果政府未能在监管和起诉方面投资，罪犯不会最终被送上法庭。

Many crime-fighting agencies lack the funding to properly analyse the torrent of so-called “suspicious-activity reports” banks file when they spot potentially dodgy transactions. SARs are a cornerstone of the current system. But banks file too many low-quality or unnecessary reports because the system incentivises them to cover their backs rather than apply sensible risk criteria. Globally they file millions of SARs a year; in Britain alone regulators received over 573,000 in the 2019-20 financial year.

许多打击犯罪机构缺乏资金来正确分析银行在发现潜在不良交易时提交的所谓“可疑活动报告”洪流。非典是当前体系的基石。但银行提交了太多低质量或不必要的报告，因为该系统鼓励它们掩盖自己的问题，而不是应用合理的风险标准。在全球范围内，他们每年记录数百万个SARs病例；仅在英国，监管机构在2019-20财年就收到了超过573，000份申请。

All this suggests that governments need to work harder collectively to make the AML system fit for purpose. “Blaming banks for not ‘properly’ implementing anti-money-laundering laws is a convenient fiction,” Mr Pol’s report concluded. It also gives an unfair pass to the non-bank actors that enable corruption. While fines for banks with poor AML controls have risen relentlessly, lawyers who set up dodgy shell companies, accountants who sign off on their fishy filings and the like have been getting away with slaps on the wrist. Britain’s revenues and customs agency, for instance, supervises more than 30,000 accountants, estate agents and other businesses for money-laundering purposes; in the 2019-20 financial year it issued just 31 fines, averaging £290,000. Governments also need to get to grips with the AML implications of cryptocurrencies, and the firms and exchanges that hawk them. A recent report by the Bank for International Settlements warned of “a critical need for swift and global implementation of international standards”.

所有这些都表明，各国政府需要共同努力，让反洗钱体系发挥作用。“指责银行没有‘恰当地’实施反洗钱法律是一种便利的虚构，”波尔的报告总结道。这也给了那些助长腐败的非银行行为者一个不公平的通行证。尽管对反洗钱控制不力的银行的罚款无情地增加了，但建立不可靠的空壳公司的律师、签署可疑文件的会计师等却逃脱了惩罚。例如，英国税收和海关署监管3万多名会计师、房地产经纪人和其他洗钱业务；在2019-20财年，它仅开出了31张罚单，平均罚款29万英镑。政府也需要掌握加密货币的反洗钱含义，以及兜售它们的公司和交易所。国际清算银行最近的一份报告警告称，“迫切需要在全球范围内迅速实施国际标准”。

Activists who campaign to fix the cracks in the global AML architecture are pinning much hope on the Biden administration, which has said that it views the fight against corruption as a national-security issue and therefore a priority. Whether it can work more profitably than its predecessor with Europe, which is overhauling AML oversight in the wake of the Danske debacle, remains to be seen. Hopes that China can be persuaded to co-operate are not high. Either way, bankers should probably brace themselves for another beating.

致力于修复全球反洗钱架构裂缝的活动人士将很大希望寄托在拜登政府身上，拜登政府表示，它将打击腐败视为国家安全问题，因此是优先事项。它是否能比其前身欧洲更有利可图，仍有待观察。欧洲在丹斯克金融危机后正在对反洗钱监管进行彻底改革。说服中国合作的希望不高。不管怎样，银行家们应该做好再次挨打的准备。

本文章英文原文来自经济学人，本人仅提供给大家一个观察国外文章的平台，文章内容不代表gongzhong号立场

英文文章及图片来源：

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/04/12/the-war-against-money-laundering-is-being-lost

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