🌅 An Ancient Director

SOURCE

Moody’s Analytics

WHAT TO KNOW

• Moody Analytics uncovered 21 million “red flags” that companies could be using to commit and conceal financial crimes around the world, including millions of instances of circular ownership, mass registrations to a single address, and atypical directorships. Companies listed 4,535 corporate directors under the age of 5, while the 943-year-old director mentioned above—who would have been born in the 11th century—is one of 2,265 purported directors over the age of 123 (the oldest known human lived to 122).

WHY IT MATTERS

• The countries with the most corporate red flags were the U.K. (5 million) and China (3.4 million), followed by the U.S. (1.8 million) in a distant third (though the U.S. led the way in money laundering risk alerts). One Chinese textile company reported earning $2 billion in revenue in 2019 despite having only one employee, more than 200,000 times the average per-employee income for global textile companies ($9,300).

CONNECT THE DOTS

• Registrations of offshore companies plummeted following the release of the 2016 Panama Papers, which exposed a vast, hidden network of financial crime and corruption after the internal records of more than 200,000 offshore companies were leaked and investigated in one of the largest journalistic collaborations in history (350 reporters across 80 countries contributed). At the heart of the investigation was Mossack Fonseca, a little-known Panamanian law firm that also happened to be one of the world’s largest creators of shell companies and fraudulent corporate structures.