DIRTY money needs introductions, property deals, signatures, bank accounts and people willing to look away. Behind almost every corruption scandal sits a quiet, well-dressed industry: the enablers. They can help stolen wealth disappear from public view and reappear as a luxury apartment, an art piece or an offshore company with no obvious owner.
Financial enablers-who include bankers, wealth managers, investment advisers and payment providers-are able to give suspicious wealth access to the formal economy. They can move money across borders, invest it and make it appear respectable. Non-financial enablers-who include lawyers, accountants, auditors, notaries, real estate agents, tax advisers and trust and corporate service providers-are often the architects of concealment, creating the structures that make dirty money almost impossible to trace.
The consequences are not abstract: when dirty money is protected, it drives up housing prices, weakens public services, distorts economies and deepens inequality, while ordinary people pay the price through lost public funds and eroded trust in institutions.
How the system works
THE Battle Cry: hide, move or invest wealth abroad. The most common services are very ordinary: setting up companies and trusts, administering them, providing nominee directors or shareholders, supplying addresses, advising on structures and facilitating real estate purchases. Used properly, these services are legal. When exploited with ill-intent, they become camouflage for corruption.
That distinction matters. Not every professional involved in a suspicious transaction is a criminal. Some may be negligent. Some may be misused. Some may have followed the rules as they stood. But that is precisely the problem: too often, the rules are weak, supervision is fragmented, and accountability arrives late-if it arrives at all.
The result is a system where corrupt wealth can move faster than the authorities trying to stop it. Enablers registered in one country may serve clients in another and create companies or trusts in a third. Secrecy jurisdictions, opaque corporate vehicles and anonymous property ownership give dirty money a place to hide. By the time investigators start asking who owns what, the trail may have already gone cold within a maze of companies, trusts, and legal arrangements.
It is obvious that most of the enablers or bagmen are taking the risk, knowing that their share of the transaction is small in comparison to the rich organizers. Some Filipinos are disgusted that even the small bagmen are stealing government funds that belong rightfully to the people.
Action needs to be taken: GIVEN the cross-border nature of dirty money, progress requires a critical mass of major financial centers to act together: governments, international organizations, civil society and the private sector to secure commitments to strengthen transparency, enforcement and international cooperation against illicit finance in real estate, gold and crypto-assets. Property, in particular, is where illicit wealth often hardens into power: it stores value, confers status and can be hidden behind companies and trusts.
Dirty money does not just exploit loopholes. It hires people who know where the loopholes are. It is time that governments stop treating enablers as background characters-and start treating them as part of the main plot.
In conclusion, dirty money rarely travels alone. As shown above, it needs a variety of enablers. And the enablers have to be prosecuted!