Understanding how laundering the proceeds of corruption is achieved and its scope in the MENA region

Abstract

Corruption is always posing heavy burden on national economies and typically no country is fully immune to corrupt acts as long as human tendency to override rules exist. When a country doesn’t have sufficient measures to fight corruption, they will suffer severe implications on many fronts namely political, economic, social etc. The United Nations convention against corruption – UNCAC was initiated in 2004 and signed by around 180 nations by today; signatory countries had to under-take significant steps and legal reforms in order to align their national regulations with the provisions of the convention. Corruption is mainly attributed to occur within government officials, high ranking employees, but previous studies showed that it can occur on various levels and sectors in an econo-my. Corrupt persons/networks have realized the necessity to hide their illicit proceedings and resorted to Money Laundering techniques in order to conceal f unds/assets away from prosecution. The objective of this paper is to shed the light on the provisions of the UNCAC and identify the link between corruption and Money Laundering by analyzing case studies requested from several Anti-corruption agencies in the MENA region.