ABSTRACT
And not only that The process has also given rise to a heightened need for financing at all levels of international society. Indeed, it should be emphasized that while in the field of crime prevention and criminal justice, qualifiers like “dirty”, “illicit” and “illegal” often precede the word “money”, in the end, mere words cannot hide a simple fact: money is money. The target manipulation; our efforts to control the problem must focus on the actors responsible for the crime. But doing so is complicated by several factors. Take secretive banking laws, for example, or better yet, safe-money havens. On the other hand, witness some of the riskiest steps taken by government in response to today’s heated competition for international finance when financial controls are relaxed and safe-money havens established. Clearly, in this context, we are not confronted with a purely criminal issue in the traditional sense, but rather, one which spans the horizon of concerns for public welfare. The risks taken by governments in this regard could be at least understood if the potential benefits were not so utterly overshadowed by the costs to financial stability, as it is here where the economic reform process in the international system runs head-on into the threat of criminal manipulation.
