The Parisian Gatekeepers and The Hollow Rules of the FATF

From Paris, a city of revolutionary ideals, now emanates a different kind of doctrine, one of financial control. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) sets the global rules for combating money laundering and terrorist financing. Countries are graded on their compliance, facing serious economic ostracism if they fail. Not unlike west leaning ‘ratings agencies’. Yet this entire system is a masterpiece of subterfuge, a smokescreen of regulations designed not to stop illicit finance, but to control its flow. The brutal truth is this: the primary architects of this system are also its greatest violators. The United States and United Kingdom, with their intelligence agencies and satellite tax havens, have constructed the world’s most sophisticated laundromat for dirty money, all while bullying developing nations to “clean house.”

The mechanism is elegant in its corruption. The FATF’s 40 Recommendations demand transparency, criminalisation of illicit flows and international cooperation. Developing nations, from Pakistan to Nigeria, are subjected to relentless scrutiny. When they are placed on the FATF “grey list” capital flees, loans (from guess who?) become prohibitively expensive and their economies are strangled. They are forced to spend millions enacting complex laws to trace every small transaction. And then, the coffers of developing nations are emptied when huge interest bills become due that ensures continued allegiance to the hegemonic ‘benefactors’ – which, by the way, may include the World Bank and IMF. 

Meanwhile, in the glass towers of London, New York and Zurich, a parallel system thrives. As noted, an estimated half of London’s premium property is owned by anonymous offshore companies. The UK’s network of Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Bermuda, form the arteries of this system. According to Transparency International, entities in these jurisdictions have been implicated in moving over $327 billion in suspect funds from 79 countries. Switzerland, the classic bastion of secret banking, continues to polish its image while remaining a vault for wealth of dubious origin.

This is not an oversight; it is policy. Professional enablers, top law firms, prestigious banks and boutique consultancies in these and other Western capitals, design the impenetrable shell companies and trust structures that make the money vanish. They comply with the letter of FATF rules while gutting their spirit. The result is a neocolonial drain: resources are extracted from the developing world, transformed into ‘legal’ assets in the West and used to inflate property markets and feed financial systems that then lecture the plundered nations on poor governance and deep-seated corruption.

The “national security” argument is the get-out-of-jail-free card which is the cloak under which the daggers are hidden. So, the most potent tool in this scheme is especially the mantra of “national security.” It is the ultimate justification, the unassailable argument that places agencies like the CIA and MI6 above the very laws their governments preach. It allows these agencies to follow the trail of funds to ensure that no nation is able to defend itself. 

Covert Funding for “intelligence operations” allows for billions in untraceable funds. Historical precedents, from the Iran-Contra affair to alliances with narco-traffickers, reveal a long pattern of using illicit finance as a tool of statecraft. Today, this likely continues through complex contracts with private entities, off-book investments and manipulated markets.

When such activities are exposed, they are dismissed as tragic anomalies rather than recognised as systemic features -with warnings that interfering in this process will exact a heavy price for those nations bold enough to point this out. Then there is geopolitical laundering where adversarial nations and their elites are sanctioned and paraded as financial pariahs.

Black and brown nations, especially, need to be beholden to mainly white western nations in perpetuity. Simultaneously, allies and strategically useful actors, whether oil-rich autocrats in the Middle-East or controversial regime figures (as in Pakistan), are granted quiet passage through the same financial systems. With a reward system that guarantees continued acquiescence.

The coup against democratically elected Muhammad Morsi, his death under questionable circumstances and the placement of Abdel Fatah Sisi in Egypt is possibly a modern-day classic western manoeuver to have “our man” stationed in the region. He was rewarded with a $100bn “loan”. These funds are welcomed, no questions asked, because the regional stability serves a larger geopolitical game. 

Thus, “national security” creates a two-tiered financial world: one set of rules for the powerful and their chosen partners, and another, far more punitive set, for the rest.

The Staggering Scale: A Five-Year Statistical Glance

The numbers over the last half-decade reveal the sheer magnitude of this controlled haemorrhage:

The Real Terror Financing

This brings us to the ultimate hypocrisy: the war on terror financing.

The West has militarised the FATF to police hawalas and informal money transfer systems vital to diasporas and poor nations. Yet it turns a blind eye to the multi-billion-dollar laundromats operating in its own cities. What, then, is the greater engine of terror?

Is it the remittance a migrant sends home, or the systematic looting of a nation’s treasury by its corrupt elite, facilitated by London bankers and stored in British Virgin Island companies? The former is monitored and criminalised. The latter is tacitly approved because it creates a dependent client class in the developing world, whose stolen wealth is then reinvested back into the Western economy, creating a stranglehold of perpetual debt and influence.

The true terror is economic terror: the terror of poverty, instability and lost futures imposed on billions by a financial system designed to keep them subservient. The most prolific funders of this terror are not in caves or rogue states; they are in penthouses in Mayfair and boardrooms in Manhattan, protected by the very laws they wrote to entrench their power.

A Call for Real Revolution?

It is time to tear down this charade. We must demand:

1. Unmask the Owners: Public, searchable beneficial ownership registries for all companies and trusts, in every jurisdiction, without exception. The “legitimate interest” loophole must be closed.
2. Sanction the Enablers: Prosecute the law firms, banks and accountants who design these schemes. Follow the money and follow the lawyers.
3. End the Double Standard: Reform the FATF to automatically escalate scrutiny of major financial hubs that attract illicit flows. Their technical compliance is meaningless if the outcome is failure.
4. Repatriate the Wealth: Create swift, transparent mechanisms to return stolen assets to their nations of origin, for the direct benefit of their citizens.

The global financial system is the new battlefield for empire. Today, conquest is not achieved with tanks, but with transactions; control is not exerted through colonial governors, but through anonymous shell companies. Until we expose and dismantle this architecture of hypocrisy, the FATF and its masters will continue to launder not just money, but the very conscience of the West, pretending to be guardians while acting as the greatest thieves of all.

And South Africa will be rewarded by being removed from the “grey list” because it had toed the line…

* Shabodien Roomanay is the board Chairman of Muslim Views Publication, founding member of the Salt River Heritage Society, and a trustee of the SA Foundation for Islamic Art. 

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media. 

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