Testing and Evidencing Compliance with Beneficial Ownership Checks
This project investigates how global networks of enablers facilitate money laundering and reputation laundering - revealing the mechanisms used by kleptocrats to conceal illicit wealth.
How Kleptocrats Hid Wealth – and Who Enabled Them
The project explored the financial and reputational tools used by corrupt elites to move and conceal illicit wealth across borders.
Money laundering undermines development, weakens democratic institutions, and allows corrupt elites to conceal stolen wealth behind layers of offshore secrecy. Professional enablers – including bankers, lawyers, and real estate agents – play a central role in wiring illicit funds through complex corporate structures designed to obscure ownership and origin. These systems are often used by politically exposed persons (PEPs) to move public funds into private accounts and luxury assets, far from public scrutiny.
The project investigated how such networks operate across borders, with a particular focus on African and post-Soviet Eurasian economies where kleptocratic practices are entrenched or emerging. It examined not only financial laundering through banking and real estate, but also forms of reputation laundering – in which elites invest in philanthropy, cultural institutions, and image management to deflect attention from their involvement in corruption.
Impact and Implications
The project examined the extent to which professional intermediaries – such as bankers, real estate agents, and service providers – complied with international anti-money laundering (AML) standards when dealing with politically exposed persons (PEPs) from high-risk jurisdictions. By identifying how rogue actors bypassed or exploited regulatory gaps, the research assessed whether existing frameworks were robust enough to address the risks posed by kleptocratic networks.
Publications
Explaining Suspicious Wealth: Legal Enablers, Transnational Kleptocracy, and the Failure of the UK’s Unexplained Wealth Orders
Unexplained Wealth Orders, introduced in the United Kingdom in 2017, were designed to tackle the problem of transnational kleptocracy. However, our research on real estate purchases in the UK by elites from post-Soviet kleptocracies dem-onstrates that incumbent elites are invulnerable…
Criminality Notwithstanding: The Use of Unexplained Wealth Orders in Anti-Corruption Cases
Drawing on the systematic methodologies behind investigative journalism, open source intelligence gathering, big-data, criminology, and political science, this series maps the transnational corporate, legal and governmental structures employed by organisations and figures in Central Asia to accumulate wealth, influence and…
The Big Question: How Will the COVID-19 Pandemic Affect Transnational Kleptocracy?
John Heathershaw contributes to a piece in the National Endowment for Democracy that makes the case that the global health pandemic will bring into sharp relief the debilitated state of social services in many countries, which could lead to greater…
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Research Team
John Heathershaw
Principal Investigator
Professor of International Relations, University of Exeter
Alex Cooley
Director, Harriman Institute, Columbia University; Claire Tow Professor of Political Science, Barnard College
Jason Sharman
Professor of International Relations, University of Cambridge
David Lewis
Associate Professor of Politics, University of Exeter
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira
Professor of the International Politics of Africa, University of Oxford, Bard College Berlin
Tom Mayne
Research Fellow, University of Exeter
Tena Prelec
Research Fellow at DPIR, University of Oxford