Kleptocrats send money around the world with the click of a button, aided by unscrupulous professionals with the expertise to launder it through anonymous offshore companies and secure it in luxury assets in the West.

According to the International Monetary Fund, as much as 5 percent of the world’s gross domestic product is laundered money, and only 1 percent of it is ever spotted. Illicit cross-border financial flows have been estimated at $1 trillion to $1.6 trillion per year. https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/globalization.html

A 2012 study put the total private wealth held offshore at up to $32 trillion and suggested that, since the 1970s, elites from 139 low-to-middle-income countries had parked as much as $9.3 trillion in offshore accounts. http://www.taxjustice.net/cms/upload/pdf/Price_of_Offshore_Revisited_120722.pdf – The word “kleptocracy” often conjures Cold War imagery of despotic tyrants in poor, faraway places. Moreover, closer to the truth is that many of the world’s most corrupt countries are in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

However, a kleptocracy is no longer a corrupt political system in a few poor nations: It is a sophisticated global network whose members include world leaders and powerful business people.  Some of their money is hidden – in structures where the owner of the illicit funds can distance themselves from the source.

One of the leading secrecy jurisdictions in providing secretive structures is the USA – Delaware, South Dakota, Wyoming and other states do not require disclosure of corporate ownership, meaning that kleptocrats are not parking their assets just in exotic locations like the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands anymore, but they are heading stateside. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/05/how-the-u-s-became-one-of-the-worlds-biggest-tax-havens/?utm_term=.d1e92ae67eae