Money laundering

• Author: Ramona Mihaela Urziceanu
• Position: Candidate to Ph.D Lecturer. AGORA University, Oradea
• Pages: 257-261

257

MONEY LAUNDERING

Candidate to Ph.D Lecturer Ramona-Mihaela Urziceanu

AGORA University, Oradea

ramonaurziceanu@univagora.ro

Abstract:

“Money laundering” isn’t a new activity, the tendency of hiding the illegal origin of

some sums and giving them a seeming legality and honesty and respect to these sums’ owners,

has old origins. There can be mentioned the Middle Age merchants and usurers who, for

hiding the received interests for the loans that they have been giving, under the circumstances

in which the Catholic Church had forbidden the usury, they came to a vary number of

financial tricks, that correspond, in many of the cases, to the nowadays funds recycling

techniques.

Being a complex process, money laundering passes through a lot of levels and

involves a lot of persons and institutions. Funds recycling is a complex process through which

the incomes from a criminal activity are transported, transferred, changed or mixed up with

legitimate funds, for hiding its basis or the property right on those profits. The need of money

recycling comes out of the willing to hide a criminal activity. It is the most dangerous element

of the underground Economy and consists of: the production, spreading and drugs using

activities, weapons traffic, nuclear materials traffic, car steeling, prostitution, flesh traffic,

corruption, blackmail, falsifying coins or other values, contraband, etc. The facts, themselves,

ask for a juridical stipulation, but analyzing it as a phenomenon, comes out that the social

danger known by the society is doubled by an Economic danger, equally bad, even if it is less

obvious and studied.

Key words: money laundering, criminality phenomenon, underground economy,

drugs traffic, criminal organizations.

Of course “money laundering” isn’t a new activity, the tendency of hiding the illegal

origin of some sums and giving them a seeming legality and honesty and respect to these

sums’ owners, has old origins. There can be mentioned the Middle Age merchants and usurers

who, for hiding the received interests for the loans that they have been giving, under the

circumstances in which the Catholic Church had forbidden the usury, they came to a vary

number of financial tricks, that correspond, in many of the cases, to the nowadays funds

recycling techniques.

The money laundering term has been used for the first time in the ‘20’s when in the

USA some criminal groups (very well known are Al Capone and Bugsy Moran) had opened

car or clothes laundries that were for laundering “dirty money”, in fact vindicating the money

that came from different criminal activities. Maybe, from these activities the name of “money

laundering” came out, that, as the tine passed, got a juridical way.

Nowadays, the fast food restaurants, casinos and companies based on cash are used on

this purpose. The transparency and the wealth situation of the financial markets are key

elements for the well functioning of the Economies, but they can be put into danger

throughout the money laundering phenomenon. Obtaining “dark money”, mainly from the

underground Economy and corruption is, generally speaking, an condemned activity, in all the

countries in the world, but the funds recycling process, through the harmless aspect that it

gets, can get out of the attention, especially on the hard competition that exist on the

international market of capitals.