In the podcast by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) Why We Get Fighting Financial Crime Wrong Oliver Bullough explains his vision on fighting financial crime.

In their newsletter, RUSI summarised it as follows:

In this episode, Tom speaks with journalist Oliver Bullough about his new book ‘Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won’, which argues that the current system for fighting financial crime has become an expensive cycle of box-ticking and compliance that fails to stop money laundering. Bullough challenges the long-standing belief that existing anti-money laundering measures are effective, arguing that governments and institutions have become trapped on a ‘hamster wheel’ of regulation without questioning whether the enormous time and money spent are producing real results.

Bullough wrote this article for The Guardian on privatisation of governmental tasks to banks and other ‘obliged entities’ (in the newspeak of AMLA ‘OEs’). He remarked in that article : “But you don’t fight terrorism by ostracising blameless people, or by alienating whole classes of the population.“. The same applies to other aspects of the current system of fighting crime by involving private companies (‘anti-money laundering’ and combating the financing of terrorism).