It was in the United States in the 1920s that the term first appeared…
It’s the era of prohibition…
the time when the manufacture, sale and importation of alcohol was totally prohibited in the country…
no glitter vodka evening for Manon and Quentin…
This federal law is obviously circumvented by the thugs…
this underground economy earns them fortunes…
except that these mountains of money earned illegally… it must be put back in the circuit… to make it legal…
and that’s how… I was going to say officially… money laundering…
A term that already defined what it defines today: transforming dirty money… into clean money…
But if the term appeared in the 1920s, the practice existed long before the American underworld…
in fact, money has been laundered for centuries and centuries…
the period of prohibition only made it become almost an activity in its own right…
In fact, we have industrialized money laundering…
It’s exactly that!
It has even become a very modern business…
those who practice it use particularly sophisticated financial techniques…
offshore companies…
anonymous bank accounts…
cross-border transactions…
and all sectors are now used to launder money…
from real estate to gambling to art and kebabs…
We will see it with you Frédéric Ploquin… there are still other sectors that participate in this parallel economy…
Obviously, countries are trying to fight against this problem…
they make laws to stem it…
but it is often the case in this kind of situation… the criminals are often one step ahead of the police…
So, money laundering, an uncontrollable phenomenon or… are there real solutions… that’s what we’re going to see for an hour…