Shadow supply chains and criminal networks

Abstract

In 2020, various governmental and civil society organisations with a strong research interest in the development of criminal activities around the world issued a white paper with the title "Criminal Market Convergence" (USAID and GI-TOC 2020). The main argument of this paper is based on 3 hypotheses: (1) An argument which comes from the literature of organisational theory argues that this convergence is increasing in situa tions where organised crime groups coordinate with other criminal actors across multiple illicit business lines or purchase illicit goods or services from one another. (2) The second argument is more service-oriented in the sense that criminal and legal markets may converge with licit markets when an organised crime group seeks to conceal its activities through front companies or purchases audit, banking and legal services that support its criminal activity. Finally, it is stated that (3) for the illicit economy the best hubs are states with good infrastructure and markets but weak institutions. Although the major interest of the white paper may have been to point to the overlap and mutual reinforcement of different criminal markets, espe cially with respect to transport, laundering, nodes and vulnerable points, the general argument promotes a view of poly-criminal networks which have cast a net of contacts and cooperation around the globe that the authorities are not able to control. By using common service providers, the same transport infrastructure and trading practices with other criminal groups, they are linking criminal markets in certain geographical areas not only, but also due to the facilitating conditions of corrupt governments or governmental agencies. This sort of geographical convergence of illicit flows and criminal markets articulates -in this view -a mapping of crime on a global scale that should orient the interventions of the law enforcement authorities in order to interrupt these networks and thus raise the costs of the criminal business.This "convergence lens" to understand criminal activities on the one hand certainly addresses relevant elements such as the mixing of licit and illicit transactions and logistics, the international character of money laun dering and complementary services, but on the other hand it suggests a view of a worldwide interconnectedness of criminal actors with an extraor

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