Tom Malinowski: Corporate Transparency Act Closed a ‘Very Easy’ Loophole for Criminals to Hide Money in U.S.

RUSH EXCERPT:

MALINOWSKI: “So imagine for a second that you’re an international criminal, like you’re a Russian oligarch trying to evade sanctions, or a drug trafficker looking for a place to put his money. Most of us don’t think of the United States as the place that would facilitate that. But in one respect, it was actually very easy because you could come to New York or Miami, find a lawyer, an accountant to create a, as you mentioned, a shell company for you. A shell company is a company that doesn’t sell any products or provide any services. It just exists on paper to help you move and store money. And then once you have that shell company, if you’re good at your game, you can spin it off into 12 or 20 or 30 shell companies subsidiaries. So you have this whole network of companies that are increasingly hard to trace to you because they’re registered in some other person’s name. And then you use one of those companies to open a bank account, like maybe in the cayman islands or in the seychelles, someplace where there’s a lot of bank secrecy, and now you’re off to the races."