May 19, 2009
Mr Chairman,
My name is Anthea Lawson. I work for Global Witness, a non-governmental organisation with offices in London and
Washington DC that investigates the links between natural resources, corruption and conflict. I lead our investigations on
how banks facilitate corruption.
For a decade and a half, our investigations into conflict diamonds, illegal logging and corruption in oil, gas and mining
have been the catalyst for international initiatives and policies to promote transparency and ensure that natural resources
do not fuel conflict. Our work has been a key driving factor behind the Kimberley Process, to control the trade in conflict
diamonds, and the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, to encourage disclosure of payments made by extractive
companies and received by governments.
But with all of these investigations into various natural resource trades, there was a missing link: the route for the money
behind these corrupt or conflict-fuelling transactions. So we started to look into it. And in each of these cases of
corruption, there was inevitably a bank involved.
Banks are not permitted to accept corrupt funds under existing international standards, but too often they do not take this
obligation seriously.
By accepting these customers, banks are fuelling corruption and therefore poverty. Countries such as Equatorial Guinea,
Republic of Congo, Angola, Turkmenistan and Liberia are stark demonstrations of how banks are facilitating the looting
of state assets. They are rich in natural resources, but these resources have been captured by a small minority for their
own benefit, robbing these countries of crucial resources needed for development and poverty alleviation. Ultimately this
creates autocracy, conflict, instability and sometimes state failure, that may require international intervention in order to
protect regional security, such as occurred in Liberia. Misappropriation of natural resource revenues also affects U.S.
energy and national security interests.
Six of the U.S. top ten oil importing countries rank at the bottom third of the world’s most corrupt countries, according to
Transparency International. An increasing amount of U.S. oil imports –now 23% of the total – come from Africa,
according to Energy Information Administration statistics.
The world’s poorest countries would be far less poor if revenue from natural resources that should be spent on
development had not been looted by their senior government officials. In 2007, the value of exports of oil and minerals
from Africa was roughly $260 billion, nearly eight times the value of exported farm products ($34 billion) and nearly six
times the value of international aid ($43 billion).
Without efforts to ensure that countries can harness their own natural resource revenues rather than seeing them lost to
corruption, U.S. taxpayers’ money provided in aid is effectively subsidising and legitimising corruption, propping up
basic state functions while leaving the rulers get on with the more lucrative business of stripping the state of its assets.
Global Witness’s research in Cambodia demonstrates this effect in action. Our recent report Country for Sale: How
Cambodia’s elite has captured the country’s extractive industries shows how Cambodia’s donors, which include the U.S.,
have repeatedly failed to make their aid dependent on measurable improvements in governance. Meanwhile, NGOs,
including Global Witness, have continued to document that Cambodia is being run by a kleptocratic elite that generates
much of its wealth via the seizure and sale of public assets, whose proceeds are then illicitly diverted into the pockets of
senior officials.
I will present three examples from the latest Global Witness report, Undue Diligence: How banks do business with
corrupt regimes. They show that heads of state and their family members from some of the world’s most disturbingly
corrupt regimes have been able to do business with some of the world’s major banks. By doing business with these
customers, these banks are facilitating corruption and therefore poverty in some of the worst-governed countries in the
world.
Why is this happening? Because, quite simply, these banks are accepting these customers. There is a raft of anti-money
laws in place, but somehow, banks are still able to do business with these customers. The regulations require banks to do
due diligence to identify their customer and his or her source of funds, and to file a suspicious activity report if they
suspect the funds are tainted. The questions we are asking, and which we would urge this committee to consider, are:
• Is fulfilment by banks of these regulatory requirements, as they currently stand, enough, in reality, to prevent
banks doing business with corrupt customers?
• Is enough being done by regulators to ensure that banks do not do business with corrupt customers?
Another issue that our report explores is the way that even though the U.S. has taken steps to tighten its anti-money
laundering framework, this may be undermined if other jurisdictions, including those in Europe with whom the U.S.
works most closely, do not take them too. This applies not just to having appropriate regulations in place, but also to
making sure that they are implemented and enforced. One of the banks that I will talk about in the following examples is a
U.S. bank. But others are European, and have taken, or kept, business that has been demonstrated by U.S. enforcement
actions to be highly risky. The U.S. must therefore use its influence in the international community to make tackling the
proceeds of corruption a global priority.
Overall, our research has shown that the key factors that are allowing banks to do business with corrupt regimes, and thus
to help perpetuate poverty, are also precisely those which have allowed banks to destabilize the U.S. and other major
economies. These are, on the part of the banks, a failure of the culture of due diligence, and on the part of the regulators, a
failure of inconsistent national-level regulations to get to grips with global flows of money.
It is now universally acknowledged that there must be action to reassess the way that we regulate banks, both at the
national level, and at the level of international cooperation. There is also, however, a huge ‘development dividend’ to be
gained by tackling banks’ facilitation of corruption at the same time. Mr Chairman, we welcome the fact that by holding
this hearing on the proceeds of corruption at this time, this committee effectively recognizes this. While dealing, as it
must, with the problems that banks have created for the U.S. economy, the U.S. government now has an opportunity to
help lift millions of people out of poverty in the developing world, in a way that aid flows will never achieve.
In our first example, we show that the international financial regulatory regime governing banks has not put into place
effective procedures to prevent them from handling the proceeds of corruption as have been used to stop the handling of
terrorist funds. Of course the threat of terrorist finance requires ongoing attention, but corruption, at the levels we are
talking about, has a devastating effect on the economic wellbeing of these countries. This has knock-on effects on the
stability of these countries, on several of which the U.S. is dependent for its energy security.
Denis Christel Sassou Nguesso is the son of the President of Republic of Congo, a west African state that earns at least $3
billion a year from its oil but where a third of the population do not live past the age of forty. He is responsible for
marketing the state’s oil.
Between 2004 and 2006, Mr Sassou Nguesso spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in luxury clothes and shoe shops in
Paris, Monaco, Hong Kong and Marbella, including tens of thousands of dollars at a time in Louis Vuitton, and repeated
trips to luxury Parisian bootmakers where the shoes cost about 765 euros, or a thousand dollars, a pair.
Corresponding documents show that Mr Sassou Nguesso’s credit card bills were paid off out of a bank account in Hong
Kong that received the proceeds of Congo’s oil revenues. These revenues should have been used to lift the people of
Congo out of poverty. Instead, they were spent on shoes, clothes and other luxuries. His credit card bill for just one
month, July 2005, came to $32,000. This would have paid for 80,000 Congolese babies to be vaccinated against measles,
a major cause of child death in Congo.
How did he do it? The documents show that he set up a shell company in Anguilla, a Caribbean tax haven, using a trust
and company services provider there that was willing to hold the shares in trust for him, which disguised his identity of
the company. He then opened a bank account in the company’s name at Bank of East Asia, Hong Kong’s third largest
bank. Money deriving from Congo’s oil sales was paid into this account. We have asked the bank if it identified the
ultimate beneficial owner of this account as the son of the president of Congo, but it said it could not tell us. However,
bank documents show that the bank knew that the money being paid into the account came from trading in Congolese oil.
When the credit card bills came in each month, the trust and company services provider, to whom they were addressed,
wrote on the shell company letterhead to the bank, instructing payment of the bills from the account. These letters are
fascinating. Firstly, they name Denis Christel Sassou Nguesso – so even if the bank had failed in its duty to identify the
beneficial owner of the account, which we do not know, it did definitely know whose credit card bill it was being asked to
pay. Secondly, and most importantly for the purpose of this hearing, these letters were stamped, presumably by the bank,
‘record of terrorists checked’.
The U.S.-led campaign to create international controls against the financing of terrorism has had results: banks are now
checking their customers are not terrorists. But there has been no similar campaign to ensure that banks worldwide do not
accept the proceeds of corruption. If the U.S. was to lead such a focus on the proceeds of corruption, the effects could be
very powerful. There is no stamp on this document that says ‘records of politically exposed persons checked.’ A
politically exposed person – or PEP – is a politician, senior official or their family member or close associate. PEPs are
recognised in the anti-money laundering regulations as higher risk because they could, potentially, have their hand in the
till. Banks are required to identify whether their customers are PEPs and, if so, to conduct enhanced due diligence on
them.
Based on our investigations, Global Witness has concluded that one of the reasons this bank did not do this is because it
is not subject to meaningful regulatory standards that require it to conduct sufficient due diligence to avoid its processing
the proceeds of corruption. The existing standards are not meaningful, because in practice, a bank faces little threat of
sanctions should it take the proceeds of corruption – a very different outcome than if it took terrorist funds. So Bank of
East Asia ran Mr Sassou Nguesso’s name through the terrorist lists to check that he was not a terrorist, but did not,
apparently, even check Google, let alone one of the specific PEP databases, to see if its customer was a family member of
the head of state as well as being a senior official of a corrupt oil-producing country. Instead, the bank went on to arrange
for payment, out of an account of a company that it knew to trade in Congolese oil products, of the personal credit card
bills of the president’s son.
In our second example, the U.S. took action against a bank for doing business with a corrupt regime, and then a bank in
Europe continued to do business with this regime and handle its funds. In 2004-5 Riggs Bank was hit with civil and
criminal penalties and forced to sell itself to another bank after a devastating inquiry by the Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations exposed how Riggs held accounts for President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea and his
corrupt government, and the Equatorial Guinea accounts were ordered closed. This inquiry uncovered numerous multimillion
dollar suspicious transactions made out of Equatorial Guinea’s oil accounts, which were under the personal
control of the president, including payments to his family members. It made it clear that the Obiang family treated the
country’s oil revenues as if they were their own personal property. Over the last decade, Equatorial Guinea has become
Africa’s third largest oil producer, with annual oil revenues of around $3.7 billion. Yet, life expectancy was only 50 in
2005 and the IMF reported in 2008 that there has been slow progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
More than three years later, the British bank Barclays was still holding an account for Teodorin Obiang, the president’s
son, at one of its branches in Paris. So a U.S. bank failed as a result of holding accounts for the Obiang family, (and it has
become a basic case study in anti-money laundering procedures) and a European bank continued to bank for one of its
most controversial members.
Teodorin Obiang reportedly earns a salary of $4,000 a month as a minister in his father’s government, yet has been able to
purchase a $35 million mansion in Malibu, California, and a fleet of fast cars, including a Ferrari which he paid for partly
with a cheque from his Barclays account in Paris, and three Bugatti Veyrons, one of the fastest cars in the world, for
which he paid 1.2 million euros (1.6 million dollars) each. Just one of Teodorin’s Bugatti Veyrons would have paid for an
insecticide treated mosquito net for every child in Equatorial Guinea.
The remainder of the payment for Teodorin’s Ferrari mentioned above came from an account he held in France at BNP
Paribas, and another Ferrari was paid for with a cheque from his account in France at CCF Banque Privée Internationale,
which has been owned since 2000 by HSBC.
Teodorin has also admitted on the record to a South African court that it is normal in Equatorial Guinea for a government
minister to keep part of each government contract in his own pocket.
Global Witness has asked Barclays what due diligence it could possibly have done to reassure itself that the source of
funds in this account is not corrupt, but Barclays said that it cannot tell us. We have posed the same questions to BNP
Paribas and HSBC, and they cannot tell us either. To this day, Mr. Obiang still has ready access to funds, and property in
the United States, as well as elsewhere. He clearly still has no problem getting banks to take deposits and transactions
from him, despite all of the evidence on the record that he and his family live off funds diverted from the government.
This case illustrates the need for the U.S. to take further action internationally to ensure that all the major banking centres
are operating at the same level. Without further steps, not only will the fight against corruption be ineffective, but U.S.
banks will not be operating on a level playing field.
When the U.S. enacted the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, in order to ensure that U.S. companies did not find themselves
at a competitive disadvantage, the U.S. pushed for an equivalent international standard. The result was the OECD Anti-
Bribery Convention. In the case of the anti-money laundering laws, there is an additional incentive to making sure that the
standards are enforced at a similar level elsewhere. Doing so will not just ensure that U.S. banks do not suffer competitive
disadvantage, but will also help to ensure that the U.S.’s efforts to tackle the corrupt money flows that cause such damage
to developing countries are not undermined. And in the case of the anti-money laundering laws, the appropriate vehicle
for ensuring international implementation and enforcement is already in existence, in the form of the Financial Action
Task Force (FATF), the inter-governmental body that sets the standards for anti-money laundering laws and performs
mutual evaluations of its members’ legal frameworks to ensure they meet this standard. The problem is that FATF’s
powers are not being effectively used.
At the end of this testimony I will make some suggestions for actions that FATF could take to ensure greater cooperation
between nations to tackle the proceeds of corruption.
Our final example reviews Citibank’s facilitation of banking activities that allowed Charles Taylor, the ex-Liberian
president now on trial for war crimes, corruptly to divert timber revenues to his personal use during the conflict in Sierra
Leone and Liberia. Liberian timber revenues were fuelling the conflict there, which was documented from 2000 onwards
by Global Witness and a UN Panel of Experts mandated by the Security Council.
Taylor was arranging for his Ministry of Finance to instruct the Oriental Timber Company (OTC), one of Liberia’s main
timber exporters, to make its payments in lieu of tax directly into a number of other non-government bank accounts,
including a two million dollar payment into Taylor’s own private account at a bank in Monrovia, the Liberian Bank for
Development and Investment (LBDI).
This dollar payment could not take place without LBDI’s correspondent bank – Citibank in New York – through which
the payment were routed, which gave Taylor the means to receive corrupt timber revenues into his own account.
In addition, payments received by OTC from its timber-purchasing clients around the world were paid into OTC’s account
at Ecobank, another bank in Liberia that had a correspondent relationship with Citibank in New York. It was on the public
record at the time that OTC was one of the key timber companies whose activities and timber sales were fueling the
fighting. Therefore, via this correspondent relationship, Citibank was also helping to facilitate Liberia’s timber-fuelled
conflict.
Global Witness asked Citibank what due diligence it had done on its correspondent clients LBDI and Ecobank, to reassure
itself that they were able to do proper due diligence themselves on their clients. Citibank said that it was not able to tell us.
But when we wrote to Ecobank to ask about these payments, it replied that it did not have any records of the payments as
this had been a difficult time in Monrovia, and the office was looted a number of times and filing cabinets stolen. If filing
cabinets were being stolen, it seems unclear how Citibank – or any other Western financial institution – could have
reassured itself that its correspondent client was doing its due diligence properly.
When doing correspondent business, the only way that a U.S. bank can ensure that the proceeds of corruption or conflict
do not enter the U.S. banking system is to do due diligence on its correspondent bank’s own customer monitoring
systems. This could not possibly have been done here by Citibank, yet the transactions took place regardless. So Citibank
handled the proceeds of the timber sales that were fueling the civil war in Liberia and the deaths of many innocent persons
in the process. No correspondent relationship should be permitted with banks in other countries that do not have in place
regulatory standards and controls equivalent to the U.S. and meeting international standards.
Tackling the problem
Global Witness has identified three key actions as necessary to curtail banks’ handling corrupt funds:
• Banks must change their due diligence practices, and not treat customer due diligence solely as a box-ticking
exercise. They must adopt policies so that if they cannot identify an ultimate beneficial owner of the funds, and do
not have strong evidence that the source of funds is not corrupt, they must not accept the customer or the
transaction.
• Bank regulations must explicitly force them to do this due diligence properly. Anti-money laundering laws must
provide not just standards, but sufficiently specific procedures to ensure that banks identify the natural person
behind the funds, and have strong evidence that the source of funds is not corrupt, or they must not accept the
customer or transaction. Such standards need to be in place internationally, and applied consistently across all
relevant jurisdictions, as a condition of access to the international payments system.
• International cooperation must improve, to close the loopholes in the global anti-money laundering net that are
created by jurisdictions with insufficient laws or enforcement of them, and by banking secrecy and tax havens.
Global Witness wrote last year to the world’s top 50 banks (as measured in July 2008) to ask them if they had a policy of
prohibiting accounts for heads of state or senior officials or their families from countries with a reputation for large-scale
corruption. Of the sixteen that responded, (only one of which was a U.S. bank – JP Morgan Chase), all but one did not
explicitly answer the question. Rabobank, a Dutch bank, admitted that it did not have such a policy in place.
Banks are not going to tackle this issue on their own. Therefore the responsibility lies with governments to ensure that
there is an appropriate standard that explicitly requires banks to avoid the proceeds of corruption, and with their banking
regulators to ensure that banks are implementing this standard.
What the U.S. needs to do
There are two arenas in which the U.S. can take action to help curtail the flows of corrupt funds that are so devastating to
some of the poorest countries in the world and which leave the financial system open to other types of destabilising risk.
Domestic action:
The U.S. has relatively strong anti-money laundering laws in place, in the form of the Bank Secrecy Act as updated by the
Patriot Act and the subsequent rulemaking. It has also taken the lead, compared to other countries, on enforcement
actions. However, at its last FATF evaluation in June 2006, the U.S. was still found to be only partially compliant with
FATF Recommendation 5, which requires countries to require their banks to do customer due diligence. The U.S. should
clarify its AML regulations, particularly relating to Section 312 of the Patriot Act, to make it absolutely explicit that banks
must not only identify an ultimate beneficial owner, but also have strong evidence that the source of funds is not corrupt,
before accepting any deposit. The U.S. must also ensure that its banking regulators do effective monitoring and
enforcement to ensure that banks are complying with these requirements.
International action:
The U.S. is the largest single contributor and driving force behind the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the
intergovernmental body that sets the international standard for anti-money laundering laws and measures member states’
compliance with them. It should use this influence to ensure that FATF undertakes further steps to make anti-corruption
rules on money laundering more stringent, including by:
• Setting up a task force specifically to address the proceeds of corruption.
• More effectively using its power to name and shame member countries that are not compliant with FATF’s
standards or that are not enforcing them. The majority of FATF’s members, including the U.S., are not fully
compliant with key FATF recommendations relating to the prevention of corrupt flows, including
Recommendations 5 (customer due diligence), 6 (identification of and enhanced due diligence on Politically
Exposed Persons) and 33/34 (prevention of misuse of corporate vehicles and legal arrangements such as trusts).
• Ensuring that FATF evaluations measure implementation and enforcement of anti-money laundering laws and not
just their presence on a country’s statute books.
The U.S. should also use its position within FATF to push for new standards within the international framework:
• Banks should be required to respond to requests for information from foreign banks or their own overseas
branches without falling foul of banking secrecy laws, whether the request is about money laundering, terrorist
financing or tax fraud (this would effectively internationalize provision 314 of the U.S. Patriot Act).
• The FATF should adopt the recommendation that every country produce full public online registers of the
ultimate beneficial ownership and control of all companies and trusts under its jurisdiction. Currently, in the U.S.
there is no such requirement, and the ultimate beneficial ownership of these vehicles is very often not subject to
any form of public disclosure. One result is that U.S. trusts and limited liability companies are frequently abused
by criminals, drug traffickers, corrupt officials, and tax cheats to launder money through banks in other
jurisdictions, including many of those most criticized by the U.S. as bank secrecy havens. The U.S. currently is
not compliant with the existing relevant FATF standard (Recommendation 33/34), and has taken minimal steps to
achieve compliance in this area, facilitating billions of dollars of money laundering a year through trusts and
companies established in the U.S. The proposed S.569 Incorporation Transparency and Law Enforcement
Assistance Act Bill would go some way towards remedying this, but it would not have such registries held
publicly, which would be the most effective standard.
• Banks should be required to be aware of which countries have laws prohibiting their PEPs from holding bank
accounts abroad, and to avoid accepting these PEPs as clients.
Current efforts to modernize regulatory practices in the financial sector offer the U.S. and the international community a
significant opportunity to address the problems that are allowing the financial system to be a conduit for corrupt funds. If
this opportunity is not taken, the global financial system will be left open not just to the proceeds of corruption but to the
opaque financial flows that have contributed to the immediate crisis, as well as to terrorist and proliferation finance.
Global Witness would also like to point out that taking action to combat corrupt money flows must go in parallel with
efforts to ensure transparency of oil, gas and mining revenues. Promoting greater accountability of how oil, gas and
mining revenues are managed is also crucial to promoting poverty alleviation in poor, resource-rich countries and helping
ensure U.S. energy security. Mr Chairman, we commend you for the leadership you have shown on this issue through the
introduction of H.R. 6066 – the Extractive Industries Transparency Disclosure Act - in the 110th Congress. This legislation
would require oil, gas and mining companies registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to publicly
disclose their payments to countries where they operate, on a country-by-country basis. We hope that H.R. 6066 will be
re-introduced this year and urge Congress to pass this important piece of legislation.
We would be pleased to see this committee take up these issues, and I would be pleased to answer any questions.
Detailed references for the case studies mentioned in this testimony are available in Global Witness, Undue Diligence: How
banks do business with corrupt regimes, March 2009 (London)
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