The working paper, “Enabler Accountability: Assessing Measures Taken against Professionals Implicated in Cases of Illicit Financial Flows from Africa”, builds on TI’s earlier study “Loophole Masters”, which examined the role played by non-financial sector enablers in illicit financial flows from Africa.
In the new publication, the authors focus not on what services such enablers provided, but on whether any accountability measures were taken against them. For the working paper, the authors analysed 78 cases involving corruption and offshore wealth concealment, identifying 103 enablers and 146 enabler-case observations, meaning instances in which a specific enabler appeared in a specific case.
TI’s key finding is that there is a substantial accountability gap in relation to enablers. Based on publicly available information, some form of accountability measure could be identified for only 19 of the 103 enablers; in 75% of the observations, no public evidence of accountability action was found.
Successful criminal enforcement proved particularly rare. Criminal accountability measures were identified in relation to at least 11 enablers, but only 3 observations resulted in successful enforcement. Most of these cases relied on money laundering charges, but a significant number of investigations were discontinued or charges were dropped.
As regards administrative accountability, accountability measures through administrative avenues were identified in only 16 of the 67 observations in which anti-money laundering requirements were already, or presumably, in place at the time the relevant services were provided. The most common supervisory measures were fines and warnings, while licence revocations were uncommon. At the same time, even where supervisory action was taken, the sanctions were often comparatively modest, raising questions about whether they were sufficiently dissuasive.
According to TI, the problem is linked not only to insufficient enforcement activity, but also to gaps in the accountability frameworks themselves. Administrative accountability may be unavailable where the relevant professions or services are not covered by AML/CFT requirements. In criminal cases, in turn, authorities often face evidential barriers: they need to establish the criminal origin of the assets, the enabler’s connection to the relevant scheme and, in many cases, the enabler’s knowledge of the illicit origin of the funds.
The authors also note that enforcement against enablers often appears reactive rather than systematic. Accountability measures were more likely to be identified in cases where enablers had been exposed through major journalistic investigations based on data leaks. By contrast, the fact that the underlying corruption offence had been confirmed in court did not always lead to an additional investigation into the role of enablers.
In this regard, TI recommends that law enforcement agencies should not treat enablers as an afterthought to cases against principal perpetrators. Their role should be considered more systematically in corruption investigations, and information about possible violations should be referred to relevant supervisory authorities, including in other jurisdictions. Supervisory authorities, in turn, should have sufficient mandates, powers, resources and independence to detect such violations, impose genuinely dissuasive sanctions and publish more comprehensive information on the results of their activities.
*In the working paper, TI uses the term “enablers” to refer to private-sector intermediaries whose services were implicated in corruption and money laundering cases, despite their expected role as gatekeepers to the financial system: lawyers, accountants, auditors, real estate agents and corporate service providers.