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This paper aims to determine the types of legal mechanisms that authorities can use to recover stolen assets for and from China.

Newspaper articles and books are examined as are relevant reports by various regulatory authorities and academic institutions.

The effectiveness of legal mechanisms in the recovery of stolen assets may be affected by issues such as the difficulties in tracing illicit funds, the ambiguous nature of “value” as well as the rise in technology.

There are limited data available in relation to the prevalence of corrupt officials along the Belt and Road Initiative and the statistical success in the recovery of stolen assets. Any discussions within this paper are based on the impressionistic observations of this author, which may not reflect the true state of affairs of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Those who are interested in examining how authorities could recover stolen assets from and for China will have an interest in this topic.

The value of the paper is to demonstrate the difficulties in recovering stolen assets for and from China.

The Financial Action Task Force (the chief international agency against money laundering) blacklisted Israel (June 2000) as one of the 15 countries that fail to cooperate in the international efforts to combat money laundering. Soon after, the Israeli Parliament enacted the Prohibition on Money Laundering Law, 5760–2000 (the ‘Law’). The Law has far‐reaching legal, economic and policy implications. This paper attempts to sketch the global backdrop against which the Law was adopted, analyse its provisions, expose its implications and draw attention to its pros and cons. It is structured along the following lines: the first section sets out the international campaign against money laundering. The second section describes the pressures exerted by the international community to persuade Israel to join the club of countries that counteract money‐laundering operations. The third and fourth sections analyse the ratio legis of the Law and its provisions, respectively. In the fifth section an account is provided of the problematic aspects of the Law. The last section provides some conclusions that may be drawn at this early stage.

On 22nd June, 2000, after a good deal of speculation, the much anticipated list of non‐cooperative countries was made public by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). They had assessed 31 countries before deciding on the final 15, deemed non‐cooperative as their laws and practices were construed as providing an impediment to the fight against money laundering. They were the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Cook Islands, Dominica, Israel, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Panama, Philippines, Russia, St Kitts & Nevis and St Vincent & Grenadines. Unfortunately for the Dominican Republic, a number of news sources from around the world substituted them for Dominica, assuming the two names referred to the same country.

Over the last two years a number of initiatives have been brought to the attention of the financial regulators sectors of the global financial system most at risk from money laundering. The Durban Declaration called for the return of wealth plundered by corrupt leaders. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the Financial Stability Forum (FSF) and the OECD all identified countries with unregulated or poorly regulated financial systems which encourage money laundering and the US Senate identified problems with correspondent banking. This added attention has encouraged more countries to join the anti‐money laundering movement and there are now 116 member countries in anti‐money laundering groups in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa. However, until their legislation is effectively implemented and the remaining countries join the global anti‐money laundering movement there is unlikely to be any significant reduction in the amount of money being laundered.

This paper considers supranational initiatives ‐ particularly those emanating from the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development, the Financial Action Task Force and the Financial Stability Forum ‐ proposing changes in the regulation of offshore financial centres. The implications of the withdrawal of US support for elements of the initiative are reviewed. The underlying rationales for change are considered, as are the probable and appropriate response for the stakeholders in the offshore centres, including governments, financial institutions and clients.

The purpose of this paper is to explain that the commonly used method allowing for inter-agency cooperation between national financial intelligence units, the memorandum of understanding, is inadequate and ineffective in creating a cooperative global financial intelligence unit capable of combating money laundering typologies on an international scale.

Methods of international financial intelligence unit (FIU) cooperation have chiefly occurred in two ways: first, through the efforts of the Egmont Group; and second, through the inclusion of provisions concerning FIUs contained in international legal documents. The first is an impossibility.

This paper proposes that the result of implementation of the 2012 Financial Action Task Force Recommendations will be an informal network of FIUs where the Egmont group acts as a centralized operator for information exchange, effectively creating an informal global FIU (“GFIU”), but that this system, or a cooperative global financial intelligence unit system based on FIU-to-FIU exchanges will not allow for effective multilateral, international cooperation.

This is because national interests and unfamiliarity with capabilities provided in the Egmont Group’s cooperative platform have and will continue to result in under-utilization of cooperative efforts, and because the traditional mechanism employed for FIU-to-FIU exchanges, the memorandum of understanding (“MOU”), makes uniform or standardized information request and transfer procedures that are required for multilateral or multi-agency efforts to combat money laundering across international boundaries an impossibility.

The Egmont Group’s cooperational structure should be the primary means by which to achieve a GFIU.

The global combat on money laundering will be more effective, thereby more fully protecting the global economy.

A comparison between the Egmont Group’s network building mechanism and the existing use of MoU to create global cooperation against money laundering has not been analyzed.

This study aims to examine the effect of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) compliance on the degree of financial inclusion (FI) across 174 economies during the period from 2011 to 2021, including developed and developing countries.

This paper uses panel dynamic threshold regression to examine whether there is a threshold effect that exists in FATF compliance.

The findings show that FATF regulations enhance financial inclusiveness all over the world, but at the same time, FATF regulations regarding AML/CFT implications impose a high cost on financial institutions above the threshold of FATF compliance.

This study’s findings indicate that nations should undertake deliberate struggle to reduce the prevalence of money laundering (ML) and terrorism financing by putting in place effective FATF regulatory frameworks to support FI.

This study’s findings indicate that nations should undertake deliberate struggle to reduce the prevalence of ML and terrorism financing by putting in place effective FATF regulatory frameworks to support FI. Regulators must, however, guarantee that the process is cost-effective and efficient.

Since, at least 9/11 financial institutions and financial intermediaries are considered to be at the forefront in the international attempt to halt illicit money transfer. Most financial institutions if involved at all play an unknowing or lax, but major role in dictating money laundering schemes. The purpose of this paper is to argue that to avoid sanctions including criminal liability, financial institutions and financial intermediaries must be better prepared and willing to assess prototypical money laundering typologies. To do otherwise will invite civil and criminal liability.

This paper examines legislative pronouncements in general and US caselaw in particular in order to assess compliance and liability: real or imagined.

There appears to be considerable agreement concerning at least one goal of terrorists attacks and that is to disrupt directly and indirectly economic global stability. Further, those charged with the task of identifying terrorist assets in a financial system and developing a profile of terrorist financial transactions has, at least according to unclassified documents, proved to be futile. Closer international investigation and co‐operation appears to be more a slogan than a reality.

Reviews examples of blatant illegal acts of money laundering within the banking community and examines the exploding real estate market and its transmigration into the world of laundering illicit money.

This paper aims to compute a measure for anti-money laundering/counter-financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) compliance and investigate its determinants.

Using the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations and assigning weights to them, the study computes a measure for AML compliance. Further, the determinants of AML compliance were investigated using ordinary least squares (OLS) data of 155 countries between 2004 and 2016.

The findings suggest that AML compliance have slightly improved over the years. Further, the OLS regression results show that technology, regulatory quality, bank concentration, trade openness and financial intelligence center significantly determined and improved AML compliance.

From the findings, it is evident that countries that wish to improve the AML compliance should focus more on technology, regulatory quality, structure of the banking sector, size of the economy and institution of financial intelligence center so as to enhance AML compliance.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper reveals a first AML/CFT compliance index that measures the cross-country level of AML/CFT compliance from the year 2004 to 2016. Subsequently, this paper adopted an OLS econometric model to identify the key determinants of AML/CFT compliance among member states of FATF.