3021/2022/WEB 'Mapping and analysis of offshore investments'

Tuesday 26 April at 10:00 CEST

OBJECTIVES

The ultimate goal of most criminals committing serious crimes is financial gain. Offshore tax havens unfortunately provide a comfortable solution for criminals to hide their illegal revenues. Criminals often invests their earnings into real estates by the use of their offshore based structures (shell companies, trusts, limited liability companies) at a later stage of money laundering. Great part of these real estates are purchased in the homeland of the criminal groups. This is quite logical, as criminals know the real estate situation in their own country the best, they wish to benefit personally from these investments and want the assets to remain in hand.

The Dutch Tax and Customs authority launched a project to map and analyse offshore investments in the Netherlands in order to identify investments of organised crime groups. The project proactively searched for potential criminal assets by assessing top investments with offshore background. This initiative had been concluded and the key players behind the project implementation from the Dutch Anti-Money Laundering Centre will share their experience during this webinar. The contributing colleagues will describe the approach and logic of the project, the analysis steps they followed, the beneficial profiling techniques and tools. Moreover they will share their first-hand experience on how such a project could work, what sort of officers you need for such an initiative, which databases you could use, how the project could be further developed, what is possible and what are the limitations of such an enterprise.

Law enforcement often limits its activity to reactive money-laundering investigations when at least the suspicion of predicate offence/money laundering activity is established. This project is an example of a proactive approach how state authorities (police, customs, tax…) should look for indicators of criminal infiltration into the legal economy.

TARGET GROUP

Law enforcement, judicial and tax officers specialised in financial investigations, economic crimes and money laundering. Officials working for police, customs, judiciary, FIU and tax administrations are all welcome. Senior state officials responsible for policy responses may also receive inspiration from the event`s topic.