Kleptocrats regularly exploit Europe’s financial system, according to a new report. In the decade since the global financial crisis, dozens of money laundering schemes linked to corrupt, abusive regimes have come to light across the continent, revealing the limits to the rule of law within European economies, analyst Chris Raggett writes in Networks of impunity: Corruption and European foreign policy, a Policy Brief for the European Council on Foreign Relations:
The networks behind these arrangements have handled hundreds of billions of dollars stolen from public institutions and private companies, often benefiting from offshore havens across the globe – and even flows of European development funding. The process has, in effect, created massive cross-border slush funds for authoritarian leaders everywhere from North Korea to Venezuela. If European countries are to check kleptocrats’ malign activities and sustain a 
rules-based international order, they will need to adapt their foreign policies and enforcement regimes to the reality of illicit finance in a deeply integrated world. RTWT
Harvard Law School’s Professor Matthew C. Stephenson has published a valuable Bibliography on Corruption and Anticorruption, featuring, among many other nuggets, ….Alicante, T. (2019). To Catch a Kleptocrat: Lessons Learned from the Biens Mal Acquis Trials [National Endowment for Democracy (NED) Working Paper].
