Spearheading the drive is a little-known coalition of crack international finance intelligence units named the Egmont Group. The group comprises top investigators from 48 countries, and is so titled because its first official meeting was at the Egmont-Arenburg palace in Brussels. It is believed that Dollars 600bn a year in proceeds from drug cartels, mafia operations and other crooked business washes through the banks, but beyond this some open registers serve as a cover for illicit operations. The clampdown is set to highlight sharply for the first time ways in which the flags can be used to cover illegal transactions.
Financial analysts say that a number of Liberian companies, for instance, are run from Switzerland.
The authorities have long known about this and done nothing because there are so many people who can front it, such as professional advisers and banks. That is why there has been a wall of silence. Member countries of the Egmont group with important offshore facilities include Bermuda, Cyprus, Guernsey, Jersey, the Netherlands Antilles, Panama and Switzerland. The US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the biggest such unit, already receives 100,000 'suspicious activity' reports a year. The Bahamas, the Cayman Islands and the Philippines are among jurisdictions that have moved swiftly to tighten laws against suspicious transactions since the G7's Financial Action Task Force named 15 offshore centers it alleged were unco-operative.