The laundering of funds of illegal origin is now uncontroversially accepted as a unlawful conduct. Consequently, some initial objections notwithstanding, it is identified as a criminal offence in all national criminal codes.
As such, however, it is also liable to be qualified as a phenomenon of sheer financial nature, most of all if one is to take into account the distortions it is capable of producing on the main economic variables, on the mechanisms for the allocation of the resource, on the efficient use of the latter and, in more general terms, on the dynamics affecting the wealth of each country. For these very reasons, in addition to adopting those instruments that have been commonly used for repressing any other criminal conduct, also a system of preventive devices, mainly guarding the financial sector, has been established. The same set of measures has been recently extended to the fight of terrorist financing, which features a clearly close connection, albeit specular with respect to money laundering, with the financial system.
As money laundering's transnational dimension has increasingly been magnified, a widening group of international organisations have been involved on the front of the preventive action, with a wide spectrum of differing functions, including setting international standards, co-ordinating the competent national authorities, issuing regulations, assessing national money laundering systems.
The current research originates from such general considerations, with a view of piecing together - also in order to identify its weaknesses and drawbacks - a complex network of principles, rules and regulatory devices featuring the international efforts of preventing and fighting money laundering and, since the tragic events of September 2001, terrorist financing.
Such network includes indeed a wide range of items, ranging from legally binding regulatory acts, international treaties, such as conventions and principles declarations (which have a varying binding force), international standards (which, being mainly applied as so-called soft law, found their own binding force on the authoritativeness of the entity issuing them).
The current research, after reviewing the efforts of the main international organisations involved in the prevention and fight against money laundering and terrorist financing, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the European Union, the Egmont Group and the Council of Europe, but also the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, analyses specific issues at stakes, including the different types of international cooperation (judicial, financial and law enforcement) that the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing relies upon, and the existing checks on the system of payment.
The publication is also equipped with a cd-rom which contains all the sources that are referred to therein.
