Professor Hamilton-Hart says the failure of financial institutions to take immediate action against potential trouble involving 1MDB dealings indicates a systemic problem in the way global finance works. Pic taken from FMT News.
KUALA LUMPUR: Global financial institutions share blame in the 1MDB saga of debt, mismanagement and corruption, according to an academic.
Professor Natasha Hamilton-Hart of the Department of Management and International Business at the University of Auckland suggests the problem is systemic, and that arresting a few rogue bankers or closing some loopholes may not entirely resolve the problem.
She notes that regulators in global financial centres failed to take significant action when they were first made aware of potential problems involving 1MDB.
An insider, she says, had reportedly told the British authorities as early as 2008 that the Swiss bank BSI – against which action has since been taken in Singapore and Switzerland – was offering services that could facilitate tax evasion and money laundering.
“But the authorities took no public action over the financial-secrecy services that the bank was providing – and there was no indication that they took any private action,” she writes in an article in East Asia Forum. Read more
