United Against Money Laundering
What Is UAML? Why Do We Need It? What Will It Take?
 A Manifesto / original / James S. Henry, Esq.

Summary
United Against Money Laundering (UAML) is an international non-profit coalition with members in more than twenty countries including citizen activists, investigative journalists, economists, lawyers, accountants, doctors, forensic scientists, and AI experts. For over a decade its core members have worked to expose wrongdoing by the world’s largest banks, law firms, accounting firms, and lobbyists.

UAML exists to confront a set of growing cross-border threats to democracy, the rule of law, the fair control of the world’s resources, and the planet’s survival. Money laundering, tax evasion, financial fraud, and unchecked monopoly power have all reached unprecedented levels, driven both by organized financial crime and by new financial and AI technologies that concentrate power in fewer private hands than ever before.

At the center of this is a global “haven industry” that conducts business in secret. Its effects are now visible everywhere: convicted criminals winning high office, disinformation platforms undermining elections, record volumes of laundered wealth, the buying of political influence and even pardons, and the weakening of efforts to control terror financing. The forms of wrongdoing are many – fraud, tax evasion, bribery and corruption, illicit trading, kleptocracy, privacy invasion, abuse of monopoly power, election manipulation, trafficking, and environmental crime – but they share the same underlying needs: to move illicit money secretly, hide it beyond the reach of law enforcement, grow it, and access it quickly. This is done through anonymous shell companies, trusts, foundations, and crypto wallets, designed by professional enablers. Such havens have grown from roughly ten in the late 1960s to more than 140 today.

There are two approaches to combat this. The first targets individual secrecy jurisdictions one by one, but this fails, because the industry simply shifts from one haven to another. The second, which UAML pursues, targets the industry itself: the banks, law firms, accounting firms, lobbyists, and their political allies who enable these crimes and have long operated with near-total impunity.

UAML’s central conviction: financial secrecy is not strength but weakness. It cannot survive scrutiny. No fortune is too large to trace, no firm too powerful to name, no jurisdiction too remote to reach. This is the work of our age, and it calls for broad participation.

The Age of Unscrupulous Capitalism

Earlier historical periods have often been identified with the dominant characteristics of
their most salient above-ground activities — for example, “the Age of Enlightenment,” “The
Age of Revolution,” “The Age of Capital,” and “The Age of Empire.”

Ours is “The Age of Unscrupulous Capitalism — Global Corruption, Financial Secrecy and Artificial Stupidity.

Read the full manifesto here