THE HILL article, "Stop Enabling Kleptocrats: More Must be Done to Stem the Influx of Dirty Money to West" By James K. Boyce and Léonce Ndikumana

The sanctions imposed on Russia in response to its aggression in Ukraine highlight the crucial role of transnational finance in enabling corrupt and autocratic regimes to flourish. Assets held abroad by specific members of the Russian elite have been frozen because they “shared in the corrupt gains of the Kremlin,” as U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh explains, “and they will now share in the pain.”  But after-the-fact efforts to identify and freeze the foreign assets of individual oligarchs are not enough: we also can and should do more to stem the massive influx of dirty money from throughout the world into Western economies. The breadth and depth of the sanctions announced so far have been constrained by fears of collateral damage not only to the Russian populace but also to Western economies. The reluctance of Germany and others to face energy shortages, for example, has prevented use of the “nuclear option” of fully blocking Russian access to SWIFT, the worldwide electronic banking network used to pay for imported gas and oil.  Read the article...