Money Laundering Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Money Laundering - Term Paper Example disposition, movement, rights with respect to, or ownership of property, knowing that such property is derived from serious crime. In simpler words, Hopton (1) defines money laundering as that process in which the criminals conceal the origins of their possessions and the ownership of their proceedings of criminal activities. Their whole objective behind doing so is to maintain control over their illegal possessions (income, wealth or property) by covering them unlawfully. Hence, we can understand money laundering as a process by which dirty money is shown as clean money. The money needs not to be intangible form. Instead, modern day money laundering includes all such transactions of relationships that involve any kind of tangible or intangible wealth or possession that has been gained through criminal activities. Literature Review Alldridge (437-463) studied the imperatives that the money laundering panic of 1990s generated with the arrival of globalization. He states in his researc h that, â€Å"If there is to be an attempt legally to regulate laundering, it (laundering) must be a relatively serious offence, and consequently the anticipated harm must be something other than complicity†, which means that money laundering should be considered as a serious threat at an international level thus uniting all nations to make combined efforts to stop it. This will help homogenize the criminal justice system worldwide. Shneider and Windischbauer (387-404) have quantified and estimated the volume of money laundering activities in their research. According to them, â€Å"The overall turnover in organized crime for example had a value of 800 billion USD in 2001 and increased to 1.700 billion USD in 2007.† These statistics show how great the turnover of money laundering in the modern world is. Article no. 22 of Pursuant to the Law on prevention of money laundering (Ministry of Finance) states how the law for the prevention of money laundering is to be impleme nted. According to it, the Law on Prevention of Money Laundering is to be implemented to make sure that money laundering does not take place at all. Article 2 of the Federal Act on Combating Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing in the Financial Sector, also called as Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA), defines the financial intermediaries that are at vulnerable end in money laundering business (Federal Authorities of the Swiss Confederation). These include banks, fund managers, investment companies, insurance institutions, security dealers, casinos, and persons who carry out credit transactions and provide their services for payment transactions. Stages of Money Laundering There are three stages of money laundering. Placement The first stage of the washing cycle of money laundering is placement. Being a cash-intensive business, large cash is generated from illegal activities which is then placed in the economic structure or is smuggled out of the country, so that the location of a cquisition of that cash can be covered (Levy 2-5). In this way, the authorities cannot figure out the location. The cash acquired is also converted into other forms like postal orders. Layering The first step in the layering phase is the concealment of the source of ownership of funds by way of creating such complicated layers of transactions that aim at impersonating the audit trail by providing