ABSTRACT
The international community has identified anti-money-laundering enforcement as an essential strategy against transnational crime and terrorism. This chapter examines some of the issues that flow from this approach. It reviews the growth and spread of the policies that build on the belief that fighting against the laundering of illicit proceeds is in fact an effective way to fight against Transnational Organized Crime and now also to fight against terrorism. There can be financial benefits for any jurisdiction engaged in aggressive anti-laundering strategies. The original policing and political explanation for the focus on money laundering was the argument that arresting individual criminals, even putting kingpins into prison, would not eliminate the criminal organizations because either the criminals would be replaced within the organizations or the leaders would continue running the criminal enterprise from within jail. Many countries have included lawyers among those bodies who must report suspicious and/or large transactions to the jurisdiction’s financial intelligence unit.
