Finance & economics | Laundry softener

The EU’s top court has made it harder to uncover dirty money

Sanction-busters rejoice

The European Court of Justice skyscraper buildings beside the European Investment Bank (EIB) East building, left, in Luxembourg, on Monday, March 15, 2021. More than 60 financial firms have established operations in the Grand Duchy due to Brexit, according to Nicolas Mackel, the head of Luxembourg for Finance. Photographer: Olivier Matthys/Bloomberg via Getty Images
|Amsterdam

Despite the armies of bankers and bureaucrats vowing to stop international money-laundering, there is still gobs of it going on. Money-laundering cases at Eurojust, the EU’s justice agency, have doubled in the past six years. One reason is that tracking dirty money is very hard. Criminals and kleptocrats create webs of shell companies with bogus owners and officers, seeking out countries with lax rules.

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Laundry softener”

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