(C) Transparency International
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How enablers facilitate illicit financial flows: Evidence from Africa [1]

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Date: 2024-04 

How do you quietly shuffle millions of dollars among 400 shell companies spread across 41 countries? With the help of an army of enablers.

That’s exactly what the daughter of former Angolan president, Isabel dos Santos allegedly did. In 2020, the Luanda Leaks investigations revealed how dos Santos’s network of offshore companies may have allowed her to take advantage of powerful connections, misappropriate state funds and siphon hundreds of millions of dollars abroad. Earlier this year, Portuguese authorities searched the offices of consulting firms previously employed by dos Santos for documents that could help their Angolan counterparts with the ongoing corruption probe.

Cross-border flows of dirty money would not be possible if corrupt officials and criminals were unable to enlist the services of enablers operating all around the world. And while financial institutions such as banks have been in the spotlight for facilitating corruption and money laundering on a large scale, professionals working in the non-financial sector – like accountants, consultants, real estate agents, lawyers and corporate service providers – have often escaped both public and regulatory scrutiny.

Isabel dos Santos’s case is just one of dozens that has informed Transparency International’s new report, Loophole Masters: How Enablers Facilitate Illicit Financial Flows from Africa. It is the first such study on the non-financial enablers used by political elites to hide, launder and invest their ill-gotten gains outside the African continent.

To better understand the role of such enablers in facilitating illicit financial flows out of Africa, we collected publicly available evidence from 78 cases, originating from 33 countries. These are cases which implicate politically exposed persons from across the continent in siphoning off proceeds of corruption abroad or parking their wealth offshore.

They came from a variety of sources, including court cases resulting in convictions for corruption, indictments for ongoing cases, as well as media investigations based on leaks of financial data.

By analysing the data on enablers and mapping the relationships between the jurisdictions where they were registered, where their clients were based and where they were providing their services, we have observed some concerning patterns.

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[1] Url: https://www.transparency.org/en/news/how-enablers-facilitate-illicit-financial-flows-from-africa

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