Suspicion and expertise: following the money in an offshore investigation

Abstract

This article explores the relation between suspicion and expertise in the context of activist investigations of offshore corruption. I reconstruct one investigation of alleged corruption in the Azerbaijani oil sector, conducted by a British organization called Global Witness, to explore how suspicion is learned and practised in the face of impenetrable offshore secrecy. For these detectives of global capital, suspicion is both a tool for arriving at an understanding of offshore corporate networks and an orientation that helps them overcome the limits of this understanding, allowing them to make political claims that go beyond what is strictly afforded by evidence and libel law. Extending recent anthropological scholarship that revises the disciplinary emphasis on truth and certainty as the mainstays of expert knowledge, I argue that investigative expertise provides imprecise and suspicious understandings of its objects that are useful despite, or even because of, the ambivalence and suspicion it entails.

Analysis of Businesses at Risk of Money Laundering and Organized Crimes: Case Study of Chinatown in the U.S.

“…Following our initial filtration of 80 entities, we noted 38 of them with some disparities between the actual business activities identified through the use of Google Maps. Out of the 38 entities further reviewed, 32% (12) were connected to immigration consulting firms, 21% (8) connected to employment agencies, 47% (18) were financial institutions (such as; remittance, money transfer, and bank)reveals. In our methodology, we employed a multistage stratified sampling technique [60,61] to thoroughly examine the selected spooled reports for potential signs of suspicious money laundering activities.…”

“…The second phase is layering, which involves transforming the illegally obtained funds that have been placed in the financial system. An example of layering technique includes a series of financial transactions, such as transferring funds to different accounts in various locations around the world [18]. The primary objective of layering is to make it difficult to trace the funds' origin and trail.…”