Donald Trump and the crypto world have done well out of each other. The Trump family has made profits of several billion dollars, and ‘cryptopreneurs’ have found the United States a newly supportive environment for their products. But the crypto world is not a single entity, and there are potential differences of opinion and approach between the parts that specialise in fraud, money laundering, and speculation (as well as the small number of societally beneficial uses), and a court case between billionaire Justin Sun and the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial threatens to blow those divides wide open.

He also had a key role in transforming Trump from cryptosceptic into cryptoenthusiast after investing millions of dollars in World Liberty Financial in late 2024, which helped to persuade the president — then running for re-election — that there was money to be made on the blockchain. 

Considering the improbability of the Trump family building an actually successful crypto company, and the strong likelihood World Liberty Financial would find a way to keep investors’ money as has happened with Trump ventures in the past, quite a lot of people assumed Sun’s money was in reality more of a gift than an investment. But it appears these doubters were wrong, at any rate that’s what it says in the suit that Sun has filed in California alleging that World Liberty Financial has abused his rights.

“Mr. Sun invested $45 million to purchase $WLFI tokens from World Liberty not only because of the project’s claims that it would promote adoption of decentralized finance… but also because of the Trump family’s association with the project,” his claim states. “But as Mr. Sun unfortunately has learned, World Liberty’s operators, including Chase Herro, see the project as a golden opportunity to leverage the Trump brand to profit through fraud.”

Sun has been careful to make clear this is not an attack on the president (“Unfortunately, certain individuals on the World Liberty project team have been operating the project in a manner that goes against President Trump’s values,” he posted on X), who is, he says, being betrayed by underlings — as autocrats have always been throughout history —  but he is certainly airing a lot of dirty laundry, which is likely to upset influential people.

Perhaps the most significant allegations, which World Liberty Financial denies, is that the Trump family’s company is on the verge of collapse, having paid most of its money to its owners, and that it tried to extort money from Sun to keep it in business. This is not just significant for its investors but also for America’s diplomatic ties, since Abu Dhabi has invested $2 billion via World Liberty Financial’s USD1 stablecoin, and the United States can ill-afford to further irritate its allies in the Gulf right now.

The timing of the lawsuit is interesting. It was notable that, shortly after Trump returned to the White House, the Securities and Exchange Commission paused its investigation into Sun. In March, that investigation was finally wrapped up, with Sun paying $10 million but not admitting wrong-doing, so he is perhaps no longer concerned about facing legal action himself.

Sun was also a major investor in Trump’s memecoin, but is not the only person who seems to have soured on that particularly unlovely project. One of the perks of being an investor in the token is the right to have dinner with Trump, but the value of that ticket dropped this year to just $539,000 from $3.28 million in 2025, with the Financial Times quoting an expert as calling the friendship between Trump and the crypto-world “a shotgun marriage,” which seems fair.

The Trump family has, however, made $320 million in fees from the memecoin alone, so I suspect they’re not that bothered.

A tale of two scammers

There was, hard though it is to imagine, a time when Trump was just a strangely-tinted TV personality with strong views on where Barack Obama was born. And back then, in those prelapsarian days, 2014’s billion-dollar Moldovan bank fraud was a big deal. It’s great to see that mega-oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc has been jailed for 19 years for his involvement in a crime that ruined his homeland.

Moldova has struggled through the resulting period of economic, financial, diplomatic and political turmoil, and it was great to see that Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary has meant it can make progress on its movement towards membership of the European Union.

The other mastermind of the bank fraud is pro-Kremlin politician Ilan Shor who was convicted and sentenced in absentia. He remains, of course, at liberty. Though his A7A5 sanctions-evading cryptocurrency has still not recovered the trading volume it had before the recent hack of the Grinex trading platform where people bought and sold it. Grinex blamed the hack on Western intelligence agencies, but Chainalysis has an interesting alternative explanation, based on the fact that A7A5 is gradually being squeezed by Western sanctions (including the latest ones from the European Union).

“Faced with mounting international pressure and a shrinking operational footprint, actors associated with Grinex could be using the guise of an alleged hack to quietly siphon liquidity and execute an exit scam,” Chainalysis suggested. I’m not saying that is what happened and to be honest, I think it’s more likely that this was the handiwork of Ukrainian hackers or standard financial criminals. I mention it, however, because Shor does have a previous record when it comes to setting up a money laundering scheme and then defrauding everyone who was foolish enough to trust him with their money. 

The billion-dollar bank fraud was a clever way to profit out of the ‘Moldovan Laundromat,’ which had been allowing Russians to smuggle money out of their homeland before Shor and his co-conspirators destroyed the Moldovan banking system and stole everyone’s cash. It would be remarkable if he had basically done the same thing for a second time with his stablecoin. Crypto people call it a rug pull.

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Someone recently asked me what mark out of 10 I’d give for the efforts of governments to tackle financial crime. It got me thinking about that one bright spot of recent times — the West’s response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago — and how it is now looking. Back in 2022, a lot of us were pleasantly surprised by the speed and ambition with which Western governments sanctioned the Russian government, state-owned companies and wealthy individuals. While Western pressure did not prevent the war, the asset freezes did impose a real cost on those conducting it. Four years on, however, those sanctions are beginning to look a bit shopsoiled. If they began at 7/10, they’re now scoring a lot lower.

There are reasons for this: Donald Trump does not appear particularly interested in Ukraine; the now former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has been snarling things up; and so on, as laid out in this analysis from Tom Keatinge. To make things worse, Trump’s latest adventure in Iran has pushed the oil prices sharply higher, earning more money for Russia while also giving Trump cover to lift sanctions, a temporary measure he has recently extended.

Keatinge argues that European countries need to be far more focussed on going after Russia’s payment mechanisms, particularly digital. “The extent to which crypto activity supports Russia’s war effort is clear,” he writes, “yet repeated initiatives to elevate the importance of opening a concerted line of effort on this issue are ignored. This must change.”

I agree, though it won’t be easy, considering the diffuse crypto ecosystem, and the increasing sophistication of Russian involvement in it. As long as Telegram is willing to host markets, the markets will continue to function to some extent whatever Western countries do (see the story of Xinbi, a Chinese-language hub for illicit crypto.) However, it does look like someone somewhere has lost patience with the ease with which Russia is funding itself.

“The sanctioned Russia-linked cryptoasset exchange Grinex announced an immediate suspension of its operations, citing a ‘large-scale cyberattack,’” reports Elliptic. According to the statement, which Kyrgyzstan-registered Grinex posted on Telegram, it lost around $13 million worth of USDT in the hack, blaming the theft on Western intelligence agencies.

“Today the attempts to destabilise our fatherland’s financial sector hit a new level, with the direct theft of the assets of Russian citizens and companies with the involvement of complex cyberattacks,” the statement said. Grinex is the successor to Garantex, which was shut down just over a year ago after years of effort by Western law enforcement. I would be surprised if Western countries had decided to take direct action against Grinex, as the exchange claims they did. Westerners tend to be a bit too legalistic for this kind of smash-and-grab, and I would expect any operation to more closely resemble what worked a year ago, conducted with Tether’s cooperation.

Instead, I suspect this attack is the work of hacktivists, perhaps working for or with the Ukrainians. Whatever the answer, it is embarrassing for the Russians, shows their crypto-security is not impregnable, and has made a noticeable dent in trading volumes of the A7A5 ruble-denominated stablecoin, which has become a key sanctions evasion tool. Three birds with one stone.

The important point is that sanctions were never supposed to be permanent: they are a foreign policy tool, not a law enforcement one. Hundreds of billions of Russian-owned dollars are languishing in various frozen bank accounts, and Western countries need to start thinking about what to do with them. They can confiscate them, investigate them or — if they’re feeling brave — use their potential return as leverage to persuade wealthy Russians to break with the Kremlin. What they shouldn’t do is leave them as they are to gather dust.

Hopefully, now that Orbán is out of the way, European countries will be able to take firmer collective action but they also need to be imaginative, and to start behaving as if they actually want Ukraine to win, rather than just not lose.

A defeat for transparency 

Of course, the United States will have a lot to say about that too, and what it ends up saying about how to tackle the Russian crypto operations will depend on what happens in the midterm elections this year. So, it strikes me as a big deal that crypto firms are once more pouring tens of millions of dollars into campaign vehicles in their quest for, what they euphemistically refer to as, “regulatory clarity.” Among them, of course, is Tether.

If you’re wondering quite how it’s possible to spend that much money on elections, I draw your attention once more to the great Integrity Index, with its records for who’s been spending what. It boggles my mind that, for example, the three Democratic rivals to the Republicans’ Susan Collins for the Maine Senate seat have raised more than $17 million just for the primary. Collins herself has raised over $10.5 million. There really shouldn’t be that much money in politics.

Besides, when it comes to value for money, investing in court cases beats investing in politics every day of the week. I don’t know how much the (ironically) anonymous plaintiffs in the 2022 case against corporate transparency in Luxembourg paid their lawyers, but its effects just seem to keep compounding to the benefit of those who want to hide their wealth from society. 

The European Union’s retreat from revealing the ownership of shell companies has given cover for Britain’s tax havens as they resisted efforts from London to force them to open up their own corporate registries. It looks like those efforts may have finally failed. “We are committed to full transparency, but I don’t think there will be any turning back,” said the British Virgin Islands’ Junior Minister for Financial Services Lorna Smith in comments confirming that the islands are in fact very much not committed to full transparency.

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Dutch friends like to tell me that their nation’s primary characteristic is bluntness, and the Netherlands’ Court of Audit has done nothing to challenge the stereotype with its bracing assessment of the country’s and, by extension, the world’s failure in fighting money laundering. Published last month, after an extensive analysis of the country’s efforts to stop dirty money, the Court’s report concludes that the system is expensive, discriminatory, and — possibly — completely ineffective. No one has really checked on that last point, so they can’t be sure, which if anything makes it all worse.

The Netherlands hosts the largest port in Europe, and is therefore home to a vast smuggling industry — Dutch politicians not infrequently warn that it’s becoming a narco-state — which requires an equally vast money laundering industry to service its profits. The Court of Audit set out to check the government’s response to this challenge, concluding that it cost banks €1.6 billion a year. It’s a price tag that has increased by almost 17% between 2021 and 2024, during which time the number of reports the banks’ 13,000 compliance officers made more than doubled.

“We think it is important that these employees make a meaningful societal contribution to preventing and combatting money laundering. There is no evidence that shows that they do,” the report witheringly observes.

The court sent surveys out to “politically-exposed people” (PEP is a jargon term meaning anyone in a position of power, or a close relative or associate) asking about their experiences. One person’s 83-year-old mother was asked to explain the source of an inheritance she received after the PEP applied for a loan. It is an eye-opening section, revealing how process is prioritised over any kind of judgement about where the risk of money laundering genuinely lies, but the real shock is in the section about different religious groups, which shows how the transactions of immigrant-focussed churches and mosques are systematically checked more thoroughly than local Protestant or Catholic congregations.

“A bank told a mosque that it was not possible to collect so much money after a prayer meeting,” the report notes. “The mosque’s trustees said the bank could come and see for itself but the bank declined. Feeling powerless and unable to deposit the money with the bank, the trustees hid it in the mosque.”

Imagine if we had an ongoing health crisis. And imagine that the government had created an expensive, intrusive system to tackle it, which was generating an endlessly increasing amount of paperwork, employing thousands of people and actively discriminating against religious and ethnic minorities. Surely, someone would at least put in the hours to check if the system worked, whether it was making people healthier, and assess therefore whether all these bad side effects were justified? 

With anti-money laundering policy, that is simply not happening. It’s based on faith rather than facts: we just need to do more of the same thing, and eventually we’ll get the results we want; if we don’t, we need to do the same thing even more. Interestingly, Texan judge Jeremy Kernodle — fresh from gutting the Corporate Transparency Act — has returned to the fight against anti-money laundering regulation. He has killed Geographic Targeting Orders, which were supposed to collect information around real estate transactions. “FinCEN’s explanations are vague, conclusory, and unpersuasive,” the court ruled. “The fact that some bad actors have conducted non-financed real estate transactions does not make such transactions categorically ‘suspicious.’”

I’m not saying I agree with Mr. Kernodle, because I don’t, but I don’t think pushback on anti-money laundering orthodoxy is necessarily a bad thing, since it obliges us to think more deeply about what actually works, rather than just going along with ineffective old policies. I hope people outside the Netherlands read the Court of Audit’s report and start wondering whether this approach isn’t long past time for a complete overhaul.

How do you solve a problem like crypto?

It’s quite unusual for there to be a divide in the UK’s anti-corruption community, which tends to agree on technocratic solutions to the problems around illicit finance, but one has emerged around the role of cryptocurrencies in political donations. Spotlight on Corruption doesn’t think the government’s moratorium on crypto donations goes far enough. There needs to be a ban, they argue, in primary legislation with additional safeguards. I agree.

The folks at RUSI, on the other hand, think a moratorium on crypto donations is a better idea since it would prime the country to take regulating cryptocurrencies more seriously, and prepare the way for them to be widespread. Take a look, judge for yourself, and let me know what you think. The difference may reflect deeper and unresolvable political differences in how countries should respond to globalisation, but it’s an interesting one to think about.

One thing I think we all agree on is the need for an urgent overhaul of all rules around electoral finance, while there’s still an honest system to approve them.

On that note, interesting news from Cambodia, which has extradited Li Xiong to China. Xiong, who is accused by governments worldwide of playing a key role in the now-collapsed Huione group, which was laundering money for crime syndicates on an industrial scale, with particular expertise in cryptocurrencies. Of course, the criminals have not stood still and have new markets up and running, but it is striking how quickly the extradition went ahead.

In contrast, the legal proceedings around the mammoth tax fraud exposed two decades ago by Sergei Magnitsky grind tortuously on, with the culprits still safe in Russia. They certainly enjoyed themselves in Europe for a while, however, as a court case in Paris shows. “The spending spree included: €668,517, ($771,703) at a Parisian art and antique gallery; €696,015 ($803,445) across two high-end French women’s fashion brands; €96,814 ($111,757) at a luxury jewellery store in Courchevel, an exclusive ski resort in the French Alps; and €127,182 ($146,813) for a Courchevel tour package.”

There are few things that reveal the moral bankruptcy of the regime in the Kremlin more than this case. It’s not enough that corrupt officials could kill a good man who exposed their $230 million theft from the Russian people, but the Russian state then shielded them while they splashed the loot on European luxury holidays, and continues to do so to this day. 

Nothing on the same scale is happening in the United States of course, but still this analysis of how enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is being politicised is a bit grim: “The transformation of U.S. antibribery tools into economic weapons also threatens to undo the global system the United States helped establish to punish business corruption.”

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The post The performative war on money laundering appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s good to celebrate the wins, and I’m delighted the British government has decided to cap political donations from voters overseas at 100,000 pounds a year. It has long been grotesque that a wealthy citizen could move to a tax haven, stop paying towards the upkeep of his home country, and use the money he’d saved in taxes to buy influence in the politics of the country he’s left behind. I’m delighted that this has (largely) stopped.

This policy came from the independent Rycroft Review into foreign interference in UK politics, which other countries will be looking at closely as well. For believers in liberal democracy, which is on the retreat everywhere, this issue has only been getting more urgent thanks to Russian interference in Moldova, Romania and Hungary; as well as Chinese spying scandals; and the new U.S. strategy of supporting far right parties in Europe.

There’s a good summary of the Rycroft report here, but perhaps the most contentious recommendation is for a moratorium on any cryptocurrency donations to politicians until a time when the government feels regulations around digital assets are robust enough for them to be safe. Nigel Farage of the Reform Party popped up to say this was a retrograde step against innovation, but the real question is whether a moratorium is strong enough.

So much of the threat to democracy arises from the fact that wealthy people have been able to park their money wherever they like, to exploit multiple countries’ loopholes to evade taxes, scrutiny and investigations, and then use their money to project influence anywhere they wish. This is what doomed Russia’s chance of gaining democracy, and it’s now threatening many other places too. 

I would love to see the governments of the remaining few liberal democracies be far more proactive in advocating the benefits of their systems, rather than staying in the perpetual defensive crouch that they seem to be in at the moment. 

Money is global, but politics is local, so rich people can buy influence in ways that are not available to others, not just because they’re richer but because they can afford a whole world full of tricks to make their money go further. The answer to this problem is either to make politics more global, so it can stand up to the money, or to make money more local, so it is subject to countries’ political processes.

This is what the Rycroft review is doing with its cap on overseas donations, and it’s also why I think a complete ban on crypto donations would be better than just a moratorium. 

The health of democracy is far too important to be subject to the whims of the unaccountable, nomadic class of the mega-rich, and nothing exemplifies their influence so much as cryptocurrencies, which are privatised money. A ban would be harder for a future government to overturn than a moratorium. And it would also send a signal that liberal democracy has its own currency, which is that it abides by rules set democratically and doesn’t need or want to outsource any aspect of that to the billionaires who dominate crypto.

A moratorium on crypto suggests a time when crypto may become acceptable, and thus a time when we won’t want money to have democratic oversight, and will be comfortable with obeying the whims of its owners. Financial innovation can be good, but we don’t need to innovate in how we pay politicians, that is too risky a game to play. So play with crypto by all means, but if you want to play with democracy, you need to abide by its rules. And democracies need to be more confident about asserting that principle. 

Democracies also need to enforce their own laws properly, which means — as Rycroft suggests — hiring and training specialist police officers who can investigate attempts to slip dirty money into politics.

Crypto’s digital dodge

On that note, I’m glad it wasn’t me that had to write the new U.S. national money laundering risk assessment. Glad it wasn’t me who had to balance the obvious reality that cryptocurrencies are the most potent new tool for financial criminals since the invention of the shell company with the political fact that the White House really likes cryptocurrencies. “Uneven and often inadequate regulation and supervision across jurisdictions allows digital asset service providers and illicit actors to engage in regulatory arbitrage,” notes the report. But without pointing out that the United States itself is a major source of that particular problem.

Case in point, Tether, the El Salvador-headquartered company behind the dollar-pegged USDT stablecoin, has hired the Big Four accountancy firm KPMG to audit its books and confirm everything is as it should be. This is, the FT notes, all part of a plan to expand into the United States and to raise money there, though you would imagine that a first audit of a company with a murky regulatory history and claiming such a vast haul of assets could take a while. 

In other crypto news: the UK has sanctioned Xinbi, an illicit online marketplace in Southeast Asia, and #8 Park, a compound where criminals can keep up to 20,000 trafficked people to engage in global scam operations. Xinbi moved something like $20 billion between 2021 and 2025, much of it stolen from vulnerable victims, to the benefit of Chinese gangsters. The transactions tend to be arranged on the messaging app Telegram. Vladimir Putin has been restricting access to Telegram for a while now, to build a government-issued surveillance app. I don’t agree with Putin’s reasons for shutting Telegram down, but I do think that the world would be better off without it. And without Tether.

It’s hard to imagine that Tether will care about British sanctions nor that they will make much of a dent in these activities, but I think we need to keep an eye on how the situation evolves when other countries take an interest too. Xinbi has already launched its own payment app, and has expanded to use other messaging apps, including Telegram, suggesting it is working to make itself immune from regulatory actions.

This replicates what we saw with Russian crypto operators moving to the rouble-denominated A7A5 in response to the freezing of notorious crypto exchange Garantex’s assets last year. USDT is still central to how value moves globally, but the new tokens create a secure bridge in and out of it, which cannot be touched by Western regulators or governments.

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The post How dodgy digital finance destroys democracy appeared first on Coda Story.

One difficulty in writing about corruption is explaining what it is. You’re either too specific — “it’s taking bribes”. Or too vague — “it’s being bad”. Another difficulty is obtaining the raw material to analyse: corrupt people don’t tend to speak openly about it, which means you’re left looking at corruption’s visible manifestations, which is like trying to understand a virus only from its spots.

So huge kudos to Earth League International for producing a detailed, specific and thoughtful report on how corruption facilitates wildlife crime globally, which is packed full of lessons for the study of corruption in general as well. Corruption is a system, everything is connected. It’s the water in which criminals swim, and it will drown the rest of us if we let it.

Earth League International embeds investigators in corrupt networks all over the world, and reveals how it is so much more than just the “abuse of entrusted power for private gain” and their report quotes multiple specific examples. The choice for an official standing in the way of a Transnational Criminal Organisation (TCO) is not between taking a bribe and being honest, it’s between taking a bribe and having a family member killed. 

“Corruption tilts the playing field of justice by turning some officials or even agencies into additional arms of criminal networks, akin to painting a group of white chess pieces red and then commencing a match, giving the criminal side a decided advantage”, notes the report. And, it adds, “Transnational Criminal Organisations are savvy about which officials they approach, assessing weaknesses such as debt or family ties that may make them more vulnerable to financial offers or threats.”

It estimates the value of global wildlife-related crime at over $1 trillion annually, which is an astonishing amount of money, but an important point to take is that this is not a separate form of corruption. The same border officials that wave through illegal shipments of timber or shark fins also help with other forms of smuggling. The money that criminals funnel into politics undermines democracy in all ways. “Corruption is not the sole purview of less wealthy nations. It is everywhere. During investigations into illegal wildlife trafficking for (traditional Chinese medicine) in Europe, for example, Earth League International found enablers in San Marino, Italy, Belgium, and Poland,” notes the report.

There is something grimly ironic that so much of the despoliation that is making things worse for everyone is driven by the trade in “medicine” and thus a desire to make the world better. In reality, of course, pangolin scales and totoaba swim bladders are no more medicinal than my toenail clippings. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this is the demand for hallucinogenic toad venom, as detailed in this excellent article from a few years ago, which supposedly helps us all access the inner divine, but which is meanwhile wiping out the unfortunate toads that secrete it. “Most harvesters don’t have a consciousness about the sacredness of the species”, said a toad practitioner. “It’s just a hustle business.”

On a more geopolitical and less psychedelic level, this report on how Russia is repurposing its influence networks in Europe so as to maintain its fossil fuel exports show that other forms of corruption have huge environmental impact of their own. “The time for polite half-measures is over. Stronger enforcement, embargoes and tariffs on Russian fossil fuels to cripple exports, personal sanctions, and transparency rules are the only way to dismantle Russia’s covert influence architecture,” it concludes.

I’d add to that: we all need to build renewable energy sources like there’s a war on, because there is, and democracies urgently need to gain the freedom to act independently of autocracies’ control of fossil fuel supplies. You can’t act freely if someone’s hands are around your neck.

So, what’s the answer? As so often with financial crime, it’s possible to be overawed by the scale of the challenge. But the important thing is just to start. Here’s a manifesto from a coalition of British environmental groups, which gives some ideas. I particularly approve of this one: “government should introduce comprehensive protections and safeguards for whistleblowers, followed by financial incentives, to enable whistleblowers to disclose evidence of corruption and money laundering”.

Of course, corrupt officials are not just standing still while we agonise about how to stop them. I am particularly alarmed by the potential appeal of modern prediction markets for allowing politicians, military officers or anyone to profit from their privileged access to advance knowledge of government actions. Here’s a remarkable story about how people betting on the specific details of the Iran War sent death threats to a Times of Israel journalist whose reporting threatened to lose them a wager.

U.S. lawmakers have introduced a bill, the BETS OFF Act, for which acronym they deserve credit — to crack down on the markets that encourage this kind of behaviour, which was also observed in the hours leading up to the U.S. attack on Venezuela. “There’s no getting around the fact that any prediction market where somebody knows or controls the outcome of a bet is ripe for corruption,” said Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut. “When events that involve good and evil, life and death become just another financial product, morality no longer matters and the soul of America is fundamentally corrupted.” 

On that note, I see that someone is trying to juice the price of the $TRUMP memecoin by inviting its biggest holders to dinner at Mar-a-Lago, apparently with a speech by President Donald Trump (or whoever that is in the decidedly weird picture accompanying the announcement — Nigel Farage in a blond wig?), and an exclusive audience for the 29 biggest holders. The president, should he attend, will not, however, be accepting gifts, which is a weight off my mind. I had been worrying that this whole event was a bit dodgy.

The announcement of the event did boost the price of the $TRUMP tokens, as presumably did the announcement that Tether head Paolo Ardoino would be the headlining speaker, a remarkable turnaround for someone whose company was, just 18 months ago, having to vehemently deny it was the subject of a Department of Justice probe. Whether corruption will continue to be seriously investigated and punished, in a newly transactional world order, remains to be seen. The signs, though, are not promising.

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The post Our corrupt world, run by oligarchs for oligarchs appeared first on Coda Story.

There has never been a better time to be a billionaire. It’s official, Forbes says so, and it’s got the numbers to prove it. Top of the magazine’s annual list is, of course, Elon Musk who is only a Bernaud Arnault (worth about $147 billion) and some change away from being the world’s first trillionaire.

But to get the real headliner, we need to drop down to number 17 where we find Changpeng Zhao ($110 billion, since you ask), founder of cryptocurrency exchange Binance and business partner of the Trump family’s own crypto firm. Centibillionaires are old hat now but CZ is, as far as I can tell, the first centibillionaire on the Forbes list to have been pardoned by the U.S. president for egregious financial criminality. That feels like quite a big deal so congratulations to him.

CZ’s pardon last October was, according to the White House, because his 2023 plea deal and $4.3 billion fine for enabling money laundering on an industrial scale were the result of “an overly prosecuted case by the Biden administration” and part of a war on cryptocurrency.

Awkwardly for all concerned, Binance is now suing the Wall Street Journal after it reported that $1 billion had moved through the company to Iran-backed terror groups. And the Wall Street Journal has not only declined to spike the story, it has doubled down by reporting that the Justice Department is now investigating the firm’s actions. “The Wall Street Journal couldn’t determine whether the Justice Department is investigating Binance itself for potential misconduct, or solely the customers on its platform,” the WSJ said. But either way, considering the White House has committed to wiping out Iran’s support of terror groups and upended the global energy markets in its quest to do so, the news reports alleging that CZ’s company enabled those same groups would surely be embarrassing for all concerned, were any of them the kind of people capable of embarrassment.

After all, the fact that Iran is using crypto on a huge scale to evade the sanctions placed on its activities, and to support foreign proxies like Hezbollah, with the active connivance of some of the biggest companies in the crypto world, could only be a surprise to the most witlessly incurious of numbskulls. Or perhaps, I suppose, they are all making so much money from crypto that they don’t care who else might be.

While we’re on the subject of Trump, he’s at No. 640 on the list of billionaires as I write this, nearly tripling his wealth in just the last two years. Forbes has this very apropos explanation: “Donald Trump has presided over the most lucrative presidency in American history, adding billions to his net worth, largely by cashing in on crypto.” 

But, I hear you ask, what about non-billionaires? How are the few billion of us whose net worth isn’t counted in the billions doing? Well, not great. And I’m beginning to feel a bit concerned about what this all means for democracy. “The widening gap between the rich and the rest is at the same time creating a political deficit that is highly dangerous and unsustainable,” said Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar back in January, and the situation has gotten worse since then.

The Bank of England’s animal stories 

I spend a lot of time at the moment talking in public about money laundering because of my new book. Top of my list for policy suggestions for tackling financial crime, if anyone were to ask, is that governments should stop printing large denomination bills: $100 bills, €200 notes or — worst of all — Switzerland’s colossal 1,000-france banknote are little used by ordinary people, but extremely helpful for criminals looking to transport large amounts of wealth in a small space.

So, in one way it was great that Britain was temporarily convulsed by controversy around banknotes last week. It’s high time we talked more about them. Could this spell the end of the UK’s own big bill: the £50, of which the Bank of England issued almost an extra 30 million last year, even though pretty much the only people that ever use them are criminals and tax dodgers? Would Britain finally get serious about ending the epidemic of financial crime?

No, of course not, the controversy was entirely about the Bank of England’s decision to replace the pictures of people on its next series of banknotes with pictures of animals. For some reason, badgers were mentioned. Also otters. “It says all you need to know about the lack of seriousness of the Bank,” said former business secretary Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, without any apparent irony, considering his own spectacular lack of seriousness in agreeing to comment on this absurdly unserious confection.

A sledgehammer that cracks nuts

While researching the anti-money laundering system that has grown over the last few decades, I have come to find it strange that there isn’t more public disquiet over the powers that governments have awarded themselves to check ordinary people’s transactions. When there is concern, it tends to come from crypto/libertarian bores (the kind of people who talk about ‘Operation Choke Point 2.0’), so perhaps no one else wants to be associated with it. But I think the situation would be a bit healthier if more of us engaged with what is being done to us in ways that we can get.

I obviously think that tackling money laundering is of huge importance, but I am coming round to the view that more public pushback over exactly how that is being done would be good. It would force policymakers to justify what they’re doing, and therefore come up with some techniques that actually work, instead of the ineffective but intrusive mess we have at the moment.

To cut a long story short, I found this contribution from the Dutch non-profit organisation ‘Privacy First’ to be interesting. “Instead of managing risk, banks seek to eliminate it by withdrawing altogether from customers or sectors perceived as problematic. The burden of compliance and over-enforcement often falls not on criminals, but on already marginalised communities with limited access to remedies,” it says.

I agree with that, and I agree also with its argument that beneficial ownership transparency should not be absolute. Were there to be opt-outs from ownership registries for vulnerable people, there would be less scope for rich crooks to argue that shell company transparency is a violation of their human rights. 

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