5 Reasons Money Launderers Won’t Worry About EU Crackdown

Dirty money could still haunt the bloc even after the announcement of a new anti-money laundering watchdog.

Brussels has set its sights on dirty money.

The European Commission on Tuesday unveiled a massive package of anti-money laundering initiatives to drive dirty money out of the bloc after repeated failures in supervision.

The crowning feature of the four-pronged package is a plan to introduce a new EU anti-money laundering authority, known as AMLA. The new EU agency should be set up within the next three years and begin direct supervision by 2026, complete with the power to issue fines worth millions of euros.

But some lawmakers and think-tankers warn that the package might not be enough to snuff out illicit financiers and suspicious activity amounting to some €160 billion across the bloc. Here are five reasons why money launders will likely be shrugging their shoulders over Brussels’ initiatives — for now.

1. AMLA won’t be built in a day

Tuesday’s package is ambitious. The new agency is set to hire 250 people to directly supervise the bloc’s riskiest financial institutions with a yearly budget of €45 million. But AMLA won’t be built in a day. The watchdog is set to only begin its direct supervisory duties from early 2026. That’s almost five years of the status quo, which has proved to be ineffective at tackling dirty money.

It would’ve made more sense to beef up the European Banking Authority’s existing powers against dirty money and improve its faulty governance structure, according to the chief executive of Brussels’ think tank the Centre for European Policy Studies, Karel Lannoo. The EBA will instead be stripped of its powers.

“Now there is a discontinuity and a vacuum of about two years,” Lannoo said. “You will demotivate EBA from the work they’ve been doing. Why should they still care” in the meantime?

2. The bloc still has blind spots

A series of dirty-money scandals since 2018 revealed a blind spot in the EU’s supervision of banks. Governments have been interpreting the bloc’s dirty-money safeguards differently for years when writing them into national law. That’s left plenty of loopholes for criminals to exploit in countries that don’t require all businesses, such as crowdfunding platforms and diamond dealers, to report suspicious transactions.

The Commission proposed a single rulebook Tuesday that will harmonize the bloc’s rules, which AMLA will police, to remedy the situation. Legislative negotiations over uniform rules can take years, however, and there are still some capitals that have yet to introduce the EU’s existing rules. Brussels has been cracking down on the bloc’s stragglers in recent years with threats of courts and penalties. All this takes time, too.

3. Other sectors remain vulnerable

AMLA’s direct responsibilities are limited to the financial industry. That means it’ll still be up to governments to tackle dirty money within other sectors, such as gambling, legal services and auditing. The new watchdog will be able to take over the supervision of specific cases when and if national authorities fail to do their jobs properly. But as recent history shows in Denmark and Estonia, it’s difficult to pinpoint where national supervisors are asleep at the wheel.

“No EU authority can supervise all anti-money laundering law enforcers, especially in the nonfinancial sector such as trade in goods, real estate, lawyers and gambling,” German Green EU lawmaker Sven Giegold said. “Therefore, it is still up to the member states.”

4. The darknet can bypass fintech rules

Finance is becoming increasingly digital. So, it’s only natural that part of the Commission’s AML package would include a bill that targets financial technology, too. The bill aims to introduce disclosure requirements for the buying and selling of crypto assets within the EU. That means any company or financial firm in the EU that transfers a digital asset in or out of the bloc will have to provide details on who’s moving the money around.

That said, the internet is global — people in Europe could still evade the disclosure rules through the darknet by finding a Chinese crypto-asset supplier to transfer funds to Russia, for example.

5. Power politics — what else?

Even if EU legislators are quick to agree on common rules and the makeup of AMLA, there’s a risk that location politics could delay the watchdog’s planned introduction for 2024. You can’t put a spade in the ground if capitals can’t agree on where to start building. EU agencies come with influence and power while boosting national economies with their well-paid employees. Capitals have been willing to fight tooth and nail to secure the lucrative prize of an agency, most recently demonstrated in the EBA’s move to Paris. A deadlock could quickly emerge if a similar fight begins over AMLA — Germany’s funds industry, BVI, has already issued its rallying cry to the German government to fight for the watchdog.

“The German government has to fight for Frankfurt as the location of the new European authority,” Thomas Richter, BVI’s CEO, said in a statement. “A failure as occurred with the EBA should not be allowed to happen again.”

This article is part of POLITICO’s premium policy service:Rs 2 crore funding scam, AAP goes to SC and more: Delhi ...Manoj-Kureel-Cartoon

 

Financial Fitness for Girls!

Money makes women independent! The sooner the better !

We make you FINANZ fit!
Do you want to be independent?
Have your finances under control yourself?
Financial education makes you independent, strong, self-confident and confident. All characteristics of today’s girls and women.

Money isn’t everything, that’s an objection. But money has power. Above all, it also has power to change the world for the better. That is why it is so important that everyone who wants to change it for the better also has money.

Talk to your parents, nieces, aunts, uncles and teachers about money, loans, stocks and investments. We’ll help and answer questions!

We are available live to all girls and interested parties on #Weltmädchentag. On Friday October 9th at 5 p.m. we will get you FINANZ fit! With Simone Bußmann / Vermögensberatung and Dagmar Frank W-T-W Women and Finance / Founder

Woman are still underrepresented in the financial world. With only around 14% women, the financial sector in Germany is one of them. In Germany only 12% of the shareholders are female !!!! A good reason to get more young girls interested in investment and finance.

W-T-W Women and Finance – Weltmädchentag 2020 offers a cross-section of the individual financial topics: investment, stock market, economy, banking, paying with the mobile phone, overdraft facility and credit traps, practical examples. Stock market, gambling or investing? How does the stock exchange work, Starbucks, McDonalds, Adidas and Co, What are stocks? Stock trading, business, trading on the phone.

Cartoon: Isabell Hemming / www.w-t-w.org/en/isabell-hemming

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, RIP

Justice of the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who died this week while still sitting on the bench, was a hero to American women. She believed above all that women could bring about a better world.  She loved Beethoven’s Fidelio, the story of Leonore, who disguises herself as a man to rescue her husband from prison. She related to it as a woman and a feminist.

Judge Ginsberg would appear on the opera stage, in a cameo role as the Duchess of Crakenthorp in The Girl of the Regiment. She sees that justice come to the heroine of the work, reealing the truth of her parentage.

Like Brunnhilde in the Ring Cycle, Justice Ginsberg saw the future of women in power. She was determined to help it come about. She loved Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, and its finale, the Immolation Scene. She understood why it took a woman to save the world. She said about Brünnhilde, ‘Only a woman could do it; only a woman could change the course of history.

The Justice was an avid opera fan.  Reviewing at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, I sat behind a railing that separated the very front of the orchestra from seats that were at the front midway.  As the lights lowered after the first intermission, I saw a black lace glove slither across the railing.  Looking up, I recognized the Justice.  She did not miss an opera performance.

Later in Santa Fe New Mexico, I attended five performances in a week. The Justice was vacationing in the front row of the orchestra. Federal Marshalls accompanied her. They are the equivalent of a Secret Service detail for sitting Supreme Court Justices. A performance of Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West had 80 gunshots as the story progressed. Opera personnel had to give the exact time of each shot so that the Marshalls would know that it was part of the production, not intended to knock out the Justice.

In New York, a marvelous play on her fellow Justice, Antonin Scalia, was preceded by a talk by the Justice Ginsberg. She admired Justice Scalia, because he always surrounded himself with law clerks whose opinions were on the opposite side of his own. In the play, he hires a black Lesbian woman to keep his arguments sharp so he can address issues raised by the opposite side with full understanding.

These two Justices were on opposite ends of the law’s interpretation, but bound at the hip by a love of the operatic form.

Yet there was nothing about Judge Ginsberg’s legal understanding that was operatic. She was grounded in law, law which grew out of a sense of equality and the fact that women did not share equally in the power of the US democracy.

At the conclusion of the 2015-16 Supreme Court term,  Justice Ginsberg  gave a number of interviews addressing court-related subjects, She also offered comments related to the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump.

In an Associated Press interview with Mark Sherman dated July 8, 2016, Justice Ginsburg, when asked for her views on a potential Donald Trump (R) administration, stated, “I don’t want to think about that possibility, but if it should be, then everything is up for grabs … ”

Two days later The New York Times published an interview between reporter Adam Liptak and Justice Ginsburg in which she offered the following comments on Trump, “I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president … For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.”

On Monday, July 11, Justice Ginsburg, in an interview with CNN legal analyst and Supreme Court biographer Joan Biskupic, called Trump “a faker” and said, “He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego. … How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that.”

In an interview with Maggie Haberman of The New York Times,  published July 12, 2016, Trump made the following remarks regarding Justice Ginsburg’s comments about his possibly becoming president, “I think it’s highly inappropriate that a United States Supreme Court judge gets involved in a political campaign, frankly … I think it’s a disgrace to the court and I think she should apologize to the court. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it .. That she should be saying that? It’s so beneath the court for her to be making statements like that. It only energizes my base even more. And I would hope that she would get off the court as soon as possible.”[4]

In a posted tweet on July 13, Trump called for Justice Ginsburg’s resignation, saying that she “has embarrassed all by making very dumb political statements about me. Her mind is shot – resign!”

In a statement released on July 14, Justice Ginsburg apologized for her statements,

Justice Ginsberg went far beyond her comfort zone, and anyone’s sense of what one could endure, in her effort to live until January 21, 2021. She didn’t make it.

Those of us who counted on her, understood this monumental concern.  American women, and all concerned citizens, are now committed to making her dying wish come true: that her successor would be nominated in the administration that succeeds our current Fascist régime

Questionable Murders in US

A pair of potential whistleblowers who knew the inside story of a company operated by three of the richest men in Kazakhstan were both found dead at a motel in Springfield, Missouri, mid-way through a Route 66 road trip on rented Harley-Davidsons.

Autopsy reports initially declared that the two men had died suddenly of malaria, but an expert on the disease told the author of a new book into global corruption that the likelihood of them dying of the same disease on the same night was “almost certainly nil.”

The deaths of the two men are now being investigated by the FBI as it emerged they were potential witnesses in a massive corruption inquiry into a mining company established by three phenomenally wealthy Kazakh oligarchs.

South Africans James Bethel, 44, and Gerrit Strydom, 45, who were found dead in their rooms at La Quinta Inn in Springfield in 2015, had quit their roles at a multimillion-dollar mining group, Eurasian Natural Resources Corp. (ENRC) earlier in the year. The company was, and remains, under investigation for corruption by Britain’s Serious Fraud office (SFO).

The events are detailed by author Tom Burgis in Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World. He told The Daily Beast: “In the West, we tend to forget how connected we are in the global economy to the parts of the world where making money can be a deadly business, places like Congo, Kazakhstan and many points in between, where lives are taken in pursuit of fortunes, to protect secrets or to hurt rivals. These are exactly the kinds of places where Bethel and Strydom operated.”

The company was founded by three Central Asian businessmen, Alexander Mashkevitch, Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov, known simply as “the Trio” in Kazakhstan. They took control of valuable mines in Kazakhstan during the wave of chaotic privatizations that occurred in the wake of the collapse of the USSR. Their wealth has been estimated by Forbes at $1.9 billion, $1.8 billion, and $1.9 billion respectively.

The mining company was at one stage one of the most valuable companies in the U.K., with a market capitalization of £20 billion ($26 billion). It bought mines in troubled parts of Africa, including Congo and Zimbabwe, that later became the focus of bribery allegations, which it denies.

Burgis told The Daily Beast: “The billionaires who control ENRC holiday in the south of France with presidents or on superyachts half as long as the Titanic [Uzbekistan-born Ibragimov, spends much of his time on a reported 26-cabin, $200 million yacht]. They snap up Damian Hirsts and hire Craig David to serenade their birthday guest.

“But more importantly, their money is power in the rawest sense. In places like Kazakhstan and Congo, where life can be tragically cheap and rulers serve the cause of their own enrichment, oligarchs such as these have power like that of the old imperialists.

“They have extended that power into the rich democracies with the help of lawyers, bankers, spin doctors, lobbyists and spies.”

Concerns about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of the men have been aggravated by the revelation that the two were seen by British prosecutors as potential witnesses in one of the U.K.’s biggest corruption probes.

The men had held senior positions in the African division of ENRC, which is at the center of a massive seven-year bribery and fraud investigation by the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office.

The deaths of the two men are now being investigated by the FBI as it emerged they were potential witnesses in a massive corruption inquiry into a mining company established by three phenomenally wealthy Kazakh oligarchs.

South Africans James Bethel, 44, and Gerrit Strydom, 45, who were found dead in their rooms at La Quinta Inn in Springfield in 2015, had quit their roles at a multimillion-dollar mining group, Eurasian Natural Resources Corp. (ENRC) earlier in the year. The company was, and remains, under investigation for corruption by Britain’s Serious Fraud office (SFO).

The events are detailed by author Tom Burgis in Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World. He told The Daily Beast: “In the West, we tend to forget how connected we are in the global economy to the parts of the world where making money can be a deadly business, places like Congo, Kazakhstan and many points in between, where lives are taken in pursuit of fortunes, to protect secrets or to hurt rivals. These are exactly the kinds of places where Bethel and Strydom operated.”

The company was founded by three Central Asian businessmen, Alexander Mashkevitch, Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov, known simply as “the Trio” in Kazakhstan. They took control of valuable mines in Kazakhstan during the wave of chaotic privatizations that occurred in the wake of the collapse of the USSR. Their wealth has been estimated by Forbes at $1.9 billion, $1.8 billion, and $1.9 billion respectively.

The mining company was at one stage one of the most valuable companies in the U.K., with a market capitalization of £20 billion ($26 billion). It bought mines in troubled parts of Africa, including Congo and Zimbabwe, that later became the focus of bribery allegations, which it denies.

Burgis told The Daily Beast: “The billionaires who control ENRC holiday in the south of France with presidents or on superyachts half as long as the Titanic [Uzbekistan-born Ibragimov, spends much of his time on a reported 26-cabin, $200 million yacht]. They snap up Damian Hirsts and hire Craig David to serenade their birthday guests.

But more importantly, their money is power in the rawest sense. In places like Kazakhstan and Congo, where life can be tragically cheap and rulers serve the cause of their own enrichment, oligarchs such as these have power like that of the old imperialists.

“They have extended that power into the rich democracies with the help of lawyers, bankers, spin doctors, lobbyists and spies.”

Concerns about the mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of the men have been aggravated by the revelation that the two were seen by British prosecutors as potential witnesses in one of the U.K.’s biggest corruption probes.

The men had held senior positions in the African division of ENRC, which is at the center of a massive seven-year bribery and fraud investigation by the U.K.’s Serious Fraud Office.

Springfield police announced at the time that the cause of death was cerebral malaria; however, the case was never formally closed.

In May this year, a local police spokesperson directed further inquiries to the FBI, saying the Bureau had “taken over the investigation of this case,” according to Burgis in a piece published in the Financial Times.

Bethel and Strydom, Burgis says, were “among the most senior ENRC officials running the African operation.”

However in 2015 they decided to leave the company; Britain’s Serious Fraud Office subsequently made contact with Bethel and they were apparently interested in contacting Strydom, Burgis reports.

In May 2015, after they had left the company, the men flew from Johannesburg via Amsterdam to Chicago, and set off along Route 66 on rented motorcycles, but died in the early stages of the trip.

Burgis says that when the cause of death was announced, “colleagues of the dead men were immediately skeptical that two men could die of malaria on the same night in the same motel.”

Sam Wassmer, a malaria expert at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who reviewed documents obtained by Burgis, said “the likelihood of two separate people developing the disease at the exact same time and dying the same night is almost certainly nil.”

The CDC did not respond to questions from Burgis. The FBI and SFO also declined to comment.

ENRC, which is counter-suing the SFO for alleged wrongdoing in the way it conducted its investigation, told London’s Financial Times that it denies any wrongdoing.

Tackling Transparency in the Time of Covid

Anne Wilson-Chapman of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists writes about the ongoing fallout from the Panama Papers in Malta, the ontinuing effort to tie Covid tax relief packages to tax transparency and Luanda ‘leaks.’

Maltese Secrets
Malta’s former deputy prime minister, Konrad Mizzi, was voted out of his party last week because of his Panama Papers connections. Our 2016 investigation revealed he incorporated undeclared shell companies shortly after taking office.  His expulsion came after he refused to step down.

“Toothless Bans”
Poland, France, Belgium and Denmark are among the European nations that want to stop companies that use tax havens from getting coronavirus-related relief funds. But tax reformers argue the laws are ‘toothless’. It  don’t go far enough and leave too much wiggle room for companies. “What we really need to be asking are specifics like: ‘Give us beneficial ownership. Give us country-by-country reporting. Comply or explain,'” said tax expert Professor Richard Murphy.

Denying Justice
Angolan billionaire Isabel dos Santos claims she has been “denied justice”  by the country’s “rigged” legal system. A Luanda court threw out an appeal to unfreeze personal and corporate bank accounts belonging to dos Santos, her husband and her senior business managers. The assets were frozen in December, just weeks before Luanda Leaks was published. Angolan prosecutors say her claim is “unfounded.”

New Tax Committe
The European Union has established yet another tax committee – albeit this time a permanent one to focus on tax avoidance in the region. The subcommittee will focus on industrial-scale corporate tax avoidance by global tech companies, and the lack of transparency around multinationals’ tax information. But the new body will have limited powers, and won’t tackle money laundering.

US Lags Behind in Political Gender Equality

Women in government are important for their point of view, their priorities, and the protection of children and families.  The United States is a laggard in promoting women in the political sphere.

Richard Reeves writes for the Brookings Institution:

Acentury on from women winning the right to vote in the U.S., our nation has made huge progress on many fronts. But plenty more is needed—and above all in the political sphere. The U.S. compares badly to most other countries in the world in terms of gender equality in politics—including to our nearest neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

Measuring gender equality

The 2020 Global Gender Gap Report from the World Economic Forumranks progress toward equality in 153 countries around the world. The U.S. is in a disappointing 53rd place, compared to 25th place for Mexico and 19th place for Canada. WEF calculates gender equality in each country based on four equally weighted domains: educational attainment, health and survival, economic participation and opportunity, and political empowerment. WEF calculates the degree of gender equality in each domain, drawing on a range on indicators for each, where each indicator ranges from 0 to 1, with 1 indicating parity.

Here is how the U.S. compares overall and on each on these dimensions to Canada and Mexico:

Gender equality in Mexico, Canada, and the United States

All three countries have achieved gender equality, or very close to equality, in education and health. (In fact, gender inequalities especially in education now go the other way, which does not influence the WEF scoring system). The U.S. and Canada score similarly, and much higher than Mexico, in terms of economic equality. But in terms of political empowerment, Mexico leads the three, followed by Canada, with the U.S. trailing well behind.

Equality in politics: The U.S. lags behind

Gender equality in the political domain is calculated by WEF using three indicators: the ratio of women to men in terms of years in executive office (prime minister or president) over the last 50 years; the current ratio of women to men in parliamentary positions; and the current ratio of women to men in ministerial positions.

All three North American nations score poorly on the first indicator. Neither Mexico nor the U.S. has had a female political leader, and Canada was led by a woman for just six months (Avril Campbell in 1993). In the U.S., 2016 was the first year when voters even had the chance to vote for a female presidential candidate from one of the major parties.

The United States trails Mexico and Canada on gender equality in politics

But as the figure shows, parliamentary representation in Mexico is now essentially equal, and ministerial representation is close behind, at 42 percent female. Both Canada and the U.S. do much less well than Mexico on the parliamentary measure, with women accounting for just one in four legislators. But Canada now excels in terms of ministerial representation, with Justin Trudeau making good on his electoral promise to choose a gender-equal cabinet.

Scoring poorly on all three metrics, the U.S. falls into the bottom half of the global league table for gender equality in the political sphere, trailing behind, for example, the Philippines, India, South Korea, and the United Arab Emirates.

By my calculations, if the U.S. matched Mexico’s political empowerment score, it would jump from 53rd to 6th place in the world for gender equality (with an overall equality score of 0.80),  beating out New Zealand, Denmark and Canada. For the U.S., politics is the biggest challenge—but also therefore potentially the biggest opportunity.

Getting closer to gender equality in politics: Congress

Improving the representation of women in Congress is a clear imperative. The last three decades have seen rapid gains on this front:

Number of women in United States Congress, by party, 1917-2019

But even now there are still three men for every woman in the U.S. Congress. It is also notable that the increase is skewed heavily to the Democrat side of the aisle, where the proportion of women has increased from 3.7 percent in 1991 to 19.8 percent in 2019, compared to a rise from 1.9 percent to 3.9 percent for Republicans. If the Republican Party had similarly increased the proportion of Senators and members of the House during this time, overall female representation would now be at 30 percent, rather than 24 percent, and would lift the U.S. from 53rd place to 43rd place on the global league table.

A step-change in female representation is needed to get close to equality within any reasonable timetable. But how? Mexico’s progress is the result of intentional policy changes. Since 2014, the Mexican constitution has required gender parity among candidates from all political parties for positions in the federal Chamber of Deputies and Senate (as well as and state congresses). The resulting transformation in representation is proof that “quota laws work,” according to Sofia Alessandra Ramirez from the Council on Foreign Relations.In fact, more than half the countries in the world now use some form of quota system to increase female representation. There is no evidence of a drop in the quality of candidates or legislators. If anything, quotas seem to improve the skills of leaders by, as one Swedish study brutally put it, reducing the number of “mediocre men.”

Quotas in politics are a great idea, but even if such a law could be passed in the U.S. it would be struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Nothing, however, is to stop the major political parties from adopting such quotas themselves—like parties in many other countries. Anisa Somani suggests that some public funding of political parties could be tied to the adoption of such quotas, an excellent proposal.

Replacing the current “winner takes all” voting system with more representative approaches such as ranked choice voting or multi-winner districts would also result in greater female representation, among many other reasons for their adoption.

Getting closer to gender equality in politics: Cabinet and president

The fastest way to improve the U.S. ranking would be to for either President Trump or President Biden to follow Trudeau’s lead and appoint a balanced cabinet. Overnight, the global standing of the U.S. in terms of gender equality would be dramatically improved. Another area where progress is needed (and has gone backwards since 2016) is in the proportion of women in advisory positions, as Kathryn Dunn Tenpas argues in her essay in this series.

But the biggest prize of all, of course, is the White House. Although WEF gives each of the four main domains—economics, health, education, and politics—an equal weight, the sub-indicators for each are weighted differently. For the political empowerment score, most weight goes to the head-of-state indicator. And here of course the U.S. gets the lowest score possible: zero. By comparison, many countries closer to the top of the gender equality table have had women as political leaders for many of the last fifty years, including Iceland (22 years), Norway (16 years), Germany (14 years), and the United Kingdom (14 years).

Simply electing a woman as president would therefore transform the position of the U.S. on the international league table for gender equality. By my calculations, if Hillary Clinton had become a two-term president in 2009, the U.S. would be 36th in the world—not high enough perhaps, but a lot higher than 53rd.

Quantifying gender inequality

The World Economic Forum is not the only game in town: there are many other indices of gender equality, including internationally-focused ones produced by the European Institute for Gender Equality the United Nations and the OECD. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, and each rest on different assumptions about what matters most and how progress should be quantified. Some include measures of time use, rates of domestic violence, tax treatment, civil liberties, and so on. Some focus more on absolute measures, while other highlight the relative position of women and men.

As a general proposition, countries that are more economically developed are typically closer to gender equality. In many of these countries, women have overtaken men on some fronts, such as education, while still at a disadvantage in many other areas, such as politics.

What would John Stuart Mill say?

Fifty years before the U.S. granted women the vote, John Stuart Mill argued in The Subjection of Women for “a principle of perfect equality.” He considered that “the most vitally important political & social question of the future, [is] that of the equality between men and women.”

But how will we know when “perfect equality” has been achieved, when the “subjection” of women has ended? Mill, like most of his contemporaries, was focused on achieving equality for women in law, and especially with the right to vote. Like his intellectual partner and wife. Harriet Taylor Mill, he hoped that women’s suffrage would pave the way to equality in other walks of life.

By and large this was an accurate prediction. Getting the vote was indeed a vital first step to getting many other social, legal and political rights for women. But even now, “perfect equality” has not been achieved—and in the U.S., especially in the sphere of politics itself.

The fight for equality began with politics, and specifically with the right to vote. After ten decades of significant social, cultural, and economic progress, the biggest challenge is once again in the political arena. Now, the need is for much greater representation of women in politics—including in the highest office in the land.

Has Putin Changed Russia Forever?

Putin Man of the Moment

A Strongman Brand Others Can Emulate

by Andrea Kendall-Taylor

For the past 20 years, Putin has been driven principally by his desire to maintain power. To this end, he has weakened the state, eliminated competition, and personalized Russia’s political system. While an older generation of Russians credit Putin for helping Russia overcome the turmoil of the 1990s, in reality he has turned the country into a kleptocracy that does not work for ordinary Russians. As he has grown more paranoid about threats to his power—internal and external, real and imagined—Putin has suppressed the freedoms of Russians, increasingly through an arsenal of digital tactics.

As he has grown more paranoid about threats to his power—internal and external, real and imagined—Putin has suppressed the freedoms of Russians, increasingly through an arsenal of digital tactics.

Despite Russia’s internal weaknesses, Putin has boosted the country’s global standing. The lack of constraints on his power, his investment in modernizing his military, and his ability to exploit asymmetries of interest between Russia and the West have allowed Putin to seize opportunities, even those that violate international laws. Today, Russia has a role in most global issues of consequence. But Putin also understands the limits of Russian influence. He has therefore sought to undermine Western democracies to improve Russia’s relative standing. His tactics and strongman brand have created a model that anti-democratic leaders emulate. As Putin has alienated Russia from the West, Russia’s place in the world is increasingly alongside the regimes of Bashar al-Assad, Hassan Rouhani, Nicolás Maduro, and Xi Jinping. Much can be told from the company one keeps.

 

Women are Good for Business

Companies with the highest percentage of female executives are, on average, 47% more profitable, 74% higher-performing on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, and 32% more transparent in ESG disclosure than those with the lowest, according to Foreign Policy Analytics’ groundbreaking Women as Levers of Change report. Through analysis of over 2,300 companies spanning 14 legacy industries around the world,  female corporate participation is benefiting businesses from the boardroom to the bottom-line. And, we offer solutions for engaging these male-dominated, legacy industries to increase gender diversity within their sectors.

Cheating with Public Money in a Time of Crisis

Mark Munn of Pennsylvania State University writes:

The jump in federal spending in response to the crisis of the coronavirus pandemic is not a new idea. Nearly 2,500 years ago, the people of ancient Athens had a similar plan – which succeeded in meeting the major threat they faced, but then tore Athenian society apart in a tangle of political recriminations after the crisis had passed.

As an historian of ancient Greece, the most telling parallel I see between current events and that long-ago past is the extreme partisan politics that befell Athens in 406 B.C.

A massive mobilization

In 406 B.C., Athens, a mega-power of the ancient Mediterranean that had built its economy on maritime trade, faccd a crisis. ,Despite recent successes in battle, deep partisan divisions over military leadership had left Athenian forces momentarily vulnerable to attack. Meanwhile, rival city-state Sparta had gained the backing of Persia and was building a navy that could challenge Athens’ control of the sea.

When the Spartans struck, they put the weakened Athenian fleet on the defensive, threatening to crush it and bring Athens to its knees.

A steel engraving of the naval battle of Arginusae in 406 B.C.

In the face of near-certain disaster, the Athenians rallied to respond, accelerating a shipbuilding program already underway by mobilizing all the resources of their Aegean empire. A new tax was passed on personal wealth, and additional money was raised by melting down the golden statues of Victory that had been dedicated on the Acropolis. The resulting coins were spent buying Macedonian pine to make oars to power the triremes, the most advanced naval fighting ships the world had yet seen.

To pull the oars, all able-bodied Athenian men, including knights who normally did not serve in the navy, were called up. Even that was not enough. The Athenians offered citizenship to all resident foreigners and slaves who were willing to serve.

In a little more than a month, the Athenians had assembled a fleet of triremes powerful enough to challenge the Spartan fleet and regain control of the sea.

An enormous battle and victory

In midsummer, 406 B.C., the Athenian and Spartan fleets met in battle in the waters between the island of Lesbos and the coast of Asia Minor. It’s known as the battle of Arginusae, after the small islands off the Asian coast that served as a base for the Athenian fleet; today they are the Turkish islands of Garip and Kalem near the city of Dikili.

Athens won decisively, killing the Spartan commander and destroying nearly half his fleet. The victory was costly: Athens lost 25 out of their 150 triremes, each with a crew of 200 men. A few of the ships were sunk close to shore, and their crews were rescued. But most of the ships lost, carrying more than 4,000 men, were adrift farther out at sea, and went down in a storm that came up in the afternoon of the battle.

Athens was saved. Sparta pleaded for peace, but Athens rejected the terms offered, confident that its navy’s proven strength required no compromises with its foe. The fleet’s commanders, eight of the 10 generals elected annually by the people of Athens, were the heroes of the day. In the elections that followed in the weeks after that battle, six of the eight were reappointed to their commands.

The remaining two generals came home to undergo a mandatory part of public service to Athens: a review of their year in office and an audit of their spending on the public’s behalf.

Rowers in a Greek trireme are carved on a monument dating to close to the time of the battle of Arginusae.

What happened to the money?

As Athens was preparing for battle, all the generals were entrusted with extraordinary amounts of money to finish and outfit ships, to hire and provision crews and more, all at top speed. In the haste to get the job done, not all the money was accounted for.

This was an opening for partisan prosecutors to investigate. One popular politician, a watchdog of the people’s money, filed charges of financial wrongdoing against one of the fleet’s generals.

The investigation revealed deeper evidence of financial abuse and mismanagement involving other generals as well as the original one accused. All the generals who had commanded during the battle were summoned back to Athens so their accounts could be audited. Four of the remaining six returned home; the other two chose not to return, fearing the consequences that awaited them at home.

An attempt to turn the tables

The generals faced prosecution from political opponents, including men who had served as ship captains during the battle and therefore would know about financial malfeasance in the preparations. If convicted, the generals faced having all their property confiscated and their Athenian citizenship revoked – changing them from national heroes to complete outcasts.

Together, the generals decided to defend themselves by attacking: They accused two of their most prominent opponents, popular political rivals who had been officers under their command, of failing to carry out their duties of recovering the shipwrecked crews. It was a serious charge, alleging responsibility for most of the battle’s casualties, that could have rendered the accusers ineligible to prosecute the generals.

The generals’ strategy backfired. Such serious new charges meant the whole matter was referred to the full Athenian assembly, the sovereign decision-making body of 5,000 to 6,000 Athenians. There, the two accused officers defended themselves against charges of dereliction of duty by producing the generals’ own report from after the battle, which made clear the storm – not human negligence – had made the rescues impossible.

That outraged the Athenians, who were angry at the generals for so transparently trying to escape their own accountability that they would accuse their officers of capital crimes. What began as an investigation of financial wrongdoing had become a contest over blame for the loss of life after the battle. The mood of the assembly determined the outcome, which was that all the generals were responsible for failing to save their men after the battle. The surviving records say nothing about the outcome of the charges of financial wrongdoing.

The verdict called for capital punishment: All six generals who had returned to Athens were put to death by hemlock poisoning.

A private grave relief in memory of an Athenian marine who died at sea; the date is uncertain but most likely from a decade or more after the battle of Arginusae. Athens, National Archaeological Museum, no. 752/Mark Munn, CC BY-ND

Everything began with enormous spending in response to an urgent crisis. Actions that seemed necessary at the peak of the emergency ended up as cover for misappropriations of public money.

But once the crisis passed, people saw those actions in a different light. Those who were found to have used the panic of the moment as an opportunity for personal gain ultimately paid the highest price. No doubt part of the reason they were judged so harshly was because so many of their fellow citizens had been forced to sacrifice their lives in a battle that enriched the powerful few.

Fraud in the Time of Corona

The Economist writes:

When Bernie Madoff owned up to a $65bn Ponzi scheme in December 2008, it was not out of guilt. He knew the game was up. Three months earlier Lehman Brothers had imploded. The market meltdown sent clients clamouring to withdraw from his funds, leaving them depleted with many investors still unpaid. American regulators had not spotted the fraud, despite a tip-off years earlier. It was not them that did for Mr Madoff, but recession.

Booms help fraudsters paper over cracks in their accounts, from fictitious investment returns to exaggerated sales. Slowdowns rip the covering off. As Baruch Lev, an accounting professor at New York University, puts it, “In good times everyone looks good, and the market punishes you harshly for not keeping up.” Many big book-cooking scandals of the past 20 years emerged in downturns. A decade before the crisis of 2007-09 the dotcom crash exposed accounting sins at Enron and WorldCom perpetrated in the go-go late 1990s. Both firms went bust soon after. As Warren Buffett, a revered investor, once put it: “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” This time, thanks to a pandemic, the water has whooshed away at record speed.

Hell and low water

Much of the swimwear was already threadbare: a borrowing binge has strained many corporate balance-sheets. Some dirty secrets are beginning to come out. Take Luckin Coffee, which had expanded to take on Starbucks in China, attracting big-name investors like Blackrock and Singapore’s sovereign-wealth fund. On April 2nd the Nasdaq-listed Chinese chain announced an ongoing internal probe amid allegations that its chief operating officer and other employees may have fabricated over 2bn yuan ($280m) in sales. On April 14th Citron Research, a short-seller, accused gsx, a Chinese online-tutoring firm listed in New York, of inflating last year’s sales. In a statement gsx denied the allegations and said Citron’s report was misleading and “full of subjective maliciousness”.

These revelations have revived fears over the flaky corporate governance of Chinese firms listed on foreign exchanges, whose audits, conducted at home, China’s government makes it hard for outsiders to inspect. A gaggle of fraud-hunters like Citron and Muddy Waters, which outed Luckin, claimed numerous scalps after the first wave of such listings a decade ago. This time they are looking beyond China.

Blue Orca Capital, an Asia-focused fund targeting corporate “zeros”, expects opportunities to pop up in other emerging markets, Europe and America. “My entire career has been in a bull market,” says its founder, Soren Aandahl. “This is exciting.” Mr Aandahl is eyeing any firms with discrepancies between the amount of capital they need to raise and the cash their accounts say they are generating. Others are focusing on industries hit hardest by the pandemic, such as travel, entertainment and property.