From Autocracy, Inc. (Anne Applebaum, 2024) pp159-60
A Russian, Angolan, or Chinese oligarch can own a house in London, an estate on the Mediterranean, a company in Delaware, and a trust in South Dakota without ever having to reveal ownership to tax authorities anywhere. American and European intermediaries-lawyers, bankers, accountants, real estate agents, and public relations and “reputation management” advisers-make these kinds of transactions possible. Their work is legal. We have made it so. We can just as easily make it illegal. All of it. We don’t need to tolerate a little bit of corruption. We can simply end the whole system.
We could, for example, require all real estate transactions, everywhere in the United States and Europe, to be totally transparent. We could require all companies to be registered in the name of their actual owners, and all trusts to reveal the names of their beneficiaries. We could ban our own citizens from keeping money in jurisdictions that promote secrecy, and we could ban lawyers and accountants from engaging with them. That doesn’t mean that they would cease to exist, but they would be much harder to use. We could close loopholes that allow anonymity in the private-equity and hedge-fund industries too. We could create effective enforcement teams and then help them operate across countries and continents. We could do all this in coordination with other partners around the world.
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