Foreign Oligarchs And The Art Of Laundering: How Dark Money Threatens Us All

Foreign Oligarchs And The Art Of Laundering: How Dark Money Threatens Us All

Share to Linkedin At regular intervals we hear from authoritative sources that the art market serves as a leading vehicle for money laundering by bad guys of all stripes – drug kingpins, shady oligarchs, kleptocrats, terrorists and the like. The trade in art lends itself to such malpractice owing to the privacy and opacity of deals. Most recently, on July 19, the New York Times ran a huge article on the topic entitled "As Money Launderers Buy Dalis, U. S. Looks At Lifting The Veil". As with most reports of this kind, the reader is left unsatisfied and wondering exactly how it all works, why it still goes on and whether it matters to the rest of us. The answer is, yes, it does. The global art market is integral to the alternate dark money economy deployed by authoritarian regimes to stay in power and subvert Western-style democracies. Last July, the U. S. Senate released a report with the kind of details that we rarely see. delineating how some $18 million was allegedly laundered via art for the prominent Rotenberg brothers, sanctioned Russian energy and construction oligarchs close to Putin. We rarely see such details, especially in the newsmedia,