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> These individuals’ presence in Dubai’s real estate market registries highlights the danger that the emirate’s loose residency requirements and «few questions

> These individuals’ presence in Dubai’s real estate market registries highlights the danger that the emirate’s loose residency requirements and «few questions asked» approach to regulation enables questionable figures to use it as a home away from home, a place to launder their illicit gains through real estate, or simply to store their wealth. I don't consider that controversial. > or simply to store their wealth. Especially this. "oOoOOoOooo soo scaary" I think the choice of words here will be seen as laughable and antiquated in the future. UAE/Dubai is on the front of this trend and it will pay off very well for them as they accelerate their diversification away from a fossil fuel economy. Other countries will simply have to find another way to get the behaviors they desire. Fingers crossed about the nukes staying siloed. But territories will shift, and that's not UAE or Dubai's problem, and when it becomes their problem, it won't be somewhere else's problem.

bogota 4y ago
I don’t understand what they expect Dubai to be doing around transactions. Their is only so much you can check when someone is buying a property and the money is being sent from abroad. I bought property recently in another (less expensive) place and they ask about where you work and so on but say I just have money saved up they really have nothing to check. Say im retired can i not buy something now? No that would be pretty stupid. Journalists these days are beyond stupid.
- vmception 4y ago
  That highlights another point really well, the low-level financial worker's perception of "source of fund laws" (AML/KYC) is laughable, the reasoning they tell the investor/customer is laughably incorrect, just an ambiguous quip about "security purposes" or "making sure you aren't a drug dealer/terrorist/laundering money" when thats all incorrect. from the investor/customer and low-level banker's perspective, it is impossible to distinguish between the actual law, their private company's interpretation of that law, strictly separate company policy, their implementation of that combination of things, the flaws or merits of that implementation, the flaws and merits of the law. In this case, the person asking you actually doesn't care at all. Your role is to simple not say the bad word. A word you don't know. So you can always say pretty much anything, as long as its not "I'm on the OFAC list and I'm circumventing sanctions moving money from my heroin business". A US citizen, for example, would never have any restriction banking in the US due to prior conduct (unless you pissed off that sector due to a history of overdrafts, bounced checks, see chexsystems). Al Capone would always be able to open a bank account or brokerage account or buy property. The Patriot Act would have never flagged the Saudi terrorist wire transfers despite being passed under the guise of flagging that kind of thing. AML/KYC is just a data mining operation masqueraded as preventing ... something. Something thats not terribly expensive, especially when compared to the amount of money that isn't flagged. Turns out people just don't want to blow up planes and buildings. The only people convicted of violating capital controls are the poorest of the proletariat that has some ambiguous and wrong understanding about "moving $10,000", and gets thrown in prison for attempting to circumvent it simply because the law against circumventing the threshold is on the books, whether the threshold would have applied to how the money was moved or not! The entire thing is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer and public sector resources, and private sector compliance costs are probably overhanging a full digit % of the GDP growth. Its successfully stigmatized the concept of having money, from the very population that needs and strives to have it the most! While everyone that can afford education or legal help or a dynasty of passed on knowledge is operating with complete freedom.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - TacticalCoder 4y ago
    > The entire thing is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer and public sector resources, and private sector compliance costs are probably overhanging a full digit % of the GDP growth. It's estimated that, worldwide, KYC/AML bring in only an insignifant 1/150th of the enormous compliance cost it puts on the private sector. More than two freaking orders of magnitude. It's, indeed, a complete total and utter waste. Not to mention that some things that used be "sacred" do not exist anymore: for example in Belgium (and in other countries I'm sure), lawyers now are forced, in many cases, to denounce potential clients that come to asks for their help. This is beyond insanity. I do believe that even bad guys should have a right to see a lawyer without fearing that the lawyer is actually a little snitch.
    - vmception 4y ago
      Definitely, and its all theatre, easily circumventable such that dirty/sanctioned/fraudulently acquired money is within the financial system. Its circumventable in the way that the KYC fails to assist the state in any investigation, and more!
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  They're not stupid. (Speculation alert) It seems to me they serve a higher level purpose of squeezing the middle class and the "small rich" (sorry, lack a better expression) out of their wealth. All this BS anti-ML, KYC, etc do is make this audience's lives harder and more expensive to invest and diversify their risks. Meanwhile, the "big rich" (again, sorry) can navigate these ridiculous bureaucracies easily, as the fixed costs are comparatively small to them. Criminals also can navigate this easy as a piece of cake. Or do they imagine that a person who committed dark crimes will stop and think: "Oh nooo, I have to send my real passport photo? Damn, busted!"
  - baybal2 4y ago
  - vkou 4y ago
    As a middle-class/small-rich person, how does anti-ML, KYC legislature make my life harder and poorer in any meaningful way? I take my paycheck, and I invest it into the SP500. My investment costs are minimal, and my investment gains are correlated with the overall health of capitalism. In what way does KYC or AML affect me? I'm not looking for theoretical tangents, I'm looking for tangible negative impact. I understand that there are criminals cheating the system, by doing something illegal, and then working around those restrictions. But how do these restrictions place an onerous burden on me? Showing ID to open a bank account is not an onerous burden that keeps me poor.
    - vmception 4y ago
      It just wastes your time when you signed up at your bank, at your brokerage firm. You may have forgot that at one point you did a tedious process. But maybe all your banking was created recently and you have a nice streamlined online signup process that worked perfectly for you, more on that later. It will waste your time when you want to do anything like borrow especially for a mortgage, or anything slightly more complex when you get some bright idea like trying to transfer the stock shares directly instead of selling them first. It will waste your time when want to invest in other things like a private equity fund or directly into someone else's company. It will waste your time if you try to create more advanced retirement accounts and then invest with those. It will definitely waste your time when the fintech middleware company that made signing up to a bank easier with some super streamlined online identity verification software doesn't recognize you. "I swear I really didn't live on any of those street addresses, wtf this was supposed to take 5 seconds".
mschuster91 4y ago
> I think the choice of words here will be seen as laughable and antiquated in the future. Or we will see countries like Dubai, Malta, Cyprus and other tax havens as collaborators and sanction them into oblivion. Places that allow the rich to prevent themselves from being taxed by their home countries do not deserve existence. The amount of money laundered and stored away in tax havens is the money that used to fund social services, healthcare or living wages before the world allowed free and unimpeded movement of money. We need to get this money back under our control - if only to prevent social unrest from the 2/3rd of the US which have less than 1000$ in liquid savings.
- celtain 4y ago
  I don't understand why we need to specifically sanction tax havens. Unless rich people are making money in the tax havens themselves (in which case they're not just tax havens), we can just levy all the taxes we want before the money leaves our own borders.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    Yup - in particular VAT tax evasion (i.e. a company putting a $2000 sticker on laptops when they pass through Bermuda) is something that the US could easily solve with a minimal cumulative VAT tax - it just chooses not to. The same corruption that leaves tax loopholes all over the place will prevent sanctions against tax havens - them existing is a desirable state by the corrupt that can purchase influence to perpetuate their existence.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    Tax havens act as incentivizers for crimes - not just tax evasion, but also for routing around international sanctions or money laundering. We're punishing people who incentivize others to do criminal acts, so why should countries be exempt?
    - r0snd0 4y ago
      Could you explain that further? How do tax havens incentivize sanctions evasion or money laundering? As far as I can tell, they’re just the most attractive places for such activities thanks to their low taxes. Laundering your money in Scandinavia probably wouldn’t be more difficult, it’d just be more expensive.
work_ta_220503 4y ago
I used to be a libertarian, but reading about international organized crime made me realize we do need the state because these people won't be stoped by NAP principle-touting ideologues. financial havens definitely and provably assist in building organizations that can subvert governments, and not in favor of your freedoms I assure you.
- vmception 4y ago
  Whitelisting transactions is a fools errand and not a policy solution. If that leaves everyone with a void and absence of any policy solution, that's where we are.
- cardosof 4y ago
  I don't know if I laugh or cry at the naivety of libertarians talking about common people funding defense contractors to protect them from organized crime and foreign state-owned armies.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- 11101010001100 4y ago
  You can still be a libertarian, you just have to give up on property rights.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    So be an actual libertarian in the original sense of the word rather than a neofuedalist?
- hkt 4y ago
  It is a great pity that so many of those havens are shielded by western countries too. The UK has the crown dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey, various Caribbean holdings), the US has various vassal states (as I understand it), France is the same, then there are the microstates like Monaco. None of it could exist without the tacit consent of large countries that have legal or diplomatic sway over these jurisdictions.

bogota 4y ago

I don’t understand what they expect Dubai to be doing around transactions. Their is only so much you can check when someone is buying a property and the money is being sent from abroad. I bought property recently in another (less expensive) place and they ask about where you work and so on but say I just have money saved up they really have nothing to check. Say im retired can i not buy something now? No that would be pretty stupid. Journalists these days are beyond stupid.

vmception 4y ago
That highlights another point really well, the low-level financial worker's perception of "source of fund laws" (AML/KYC) is laughable, the reasoning they tell the investor/customer is laughably incorrect, just an ambiguous quip about "security purposes" or "making sure you aren't a drug dealer/terrorist/laundering money" when thats all incorrect. from the investor/customer and low-level banker's perspective, it is impossible to distinguish between the actual law, their private company's interpretation of that law, strictly separate company policy, their implementation of that combination of things, the flaws or merits of that implementation, the flaws and merits of the law. In this case, the person asking you actually doesn't care at all. Your role is to simple not say the bad word. A word you don't know. So you can always say pretty much anything, as long as its not "I'm on the OFAC list and I'm circumventing sanctions moving money from my heroin business". A US citizen, for example, would never have any restriction banking in the US due to prior conduct (unless you pissed off that sector due to a history of overdrafts, bounced checks, see chexsystems). Al Capone would always be able to open a bank account or brokerage account or buy property. The Patriot Act would have never flagged the Saudi terrorist wire transfers despite being passed under the guise of flagging that kind of thing. AML/KYC is just a data mining operation masqueraded as preventing ... something. Something thats not terribly expensive, especially when compared to the amount of money that isn't flagged. Turns out people just don't want to blow up planes and buildings. The only people convicted of violating capital controls are the poorest of the proletariat that has some ambiguous and wrong understanding about "moving $10,000", and gets thrown in prison for attempting to circumvent it simply because the law against circumventing the threshold is on the books, whether the threshold would have applied to how the money was moved or not! The entire thing is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer and public sector resources, and private sector compliance costs are probably overhanging a full digit % of the GDP growth. Its successfully stigmatized the concept of having money, from the very population that needs and strives to have it the most! While everyone that can afford education or legal help or a dynasty of passed on knowledge is operating with complete freedom.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  > The entire thing is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer and public sector resources, and private sector compliance costs are probably overhanging a full digit % of the GDP growth. It's estimated that, worldwide, KYC/AML bring in only an insignifant 1/150th of the enormous compliance cost it puts on the private sector. More than two freaking orders of magnitude. It's, indeed, a complete total and utter waste. Not to mention that some things that used be "sacred" do not exist anymore: for example in Belgium (and in other countries I'm sure), lawyers now are forced, in many cases, to denounce potential clients that come to asks for their help. This is beyond insanity. I do believe that even bad guys should have a right to see a lawyer without fearing that the lawyer is actually a little snitch.
  - vmception 4y ago
    Definitely, and its all theatre, easily circumventable such that dirty/sanctioned/fraudulently acquired money is within the financial system. Its circumventable in the way that the KYC fails to assist the state in any investigation, and more!
rmbyrro 4y ago
They're not stupid. (Speculation alert) It seems to me they serve a higher level purpose of squeezing the middle class and the "small rich" (sorry, lack a better expression) out of their wealth. All this BS anti-ML, KYC, etc do is make this audience's lives harder and more expensive to invest and diversify their risks. Meanwhile, the "big rich" (again, sorry) can navigate these ridiculous bureaucracies easily, as the fixed costs are comparatively small to them. Criminals also can navigate this easy as a piece of cake. Or do they imagine that a person who committed dark crimes will stop and think: "Oh nooo, I have to send my real passport photo? Damn, busted!"
- baybal2 4y ago
- vkou 4y ago
  As a middle-class/small-rich person, how does anti-ML, KYC legislature make my life harder and poorer in any meaningful way? I take my paycheck, and I invest it into the SP500. My investment costs are minimal, and my investment gains are correlated with the overall health of capitalism. In what way does KYC or AML affect me? I'm not looking for theoretical tangents, I'm looking for tangible negative impact. I understand that there are criminals cheating the system, by doing something illegal, and then working around those restrictions. But how do these restrictions place an onerous burden on me? Showing ID to open a bank account is not an onerous burden that keeps me poor.
  - vmception 4y ago
    It just wastes your time when you signed up at your bank, at your brokerage firm. You may have forgot that at one point you did a tedious process. But maybe all your banking was created recently and you have a nice streamlined online signup process that worked perfectly for you, more on that later. It will waste your time when you want to do anything like borrow especially for a mortgage, or anything slightly more complex when you get some bright idea like trying to transfer the stock shares directly instead of selling them first. It will waste your time when want to invest in other things like a private equity fund or directly into someone else's company. It will waste your time if you try to create more advanced retirement accounts and then invest with those. It will definitely waste your time when the fintech middleware company that made signing up to a bank easier with some super streamlined online identity verification software doesn't recognize you. "I swear I really didn't live on any of those street addresses, wtf this was supposed to take 5 seconds".

mschuster91 4y ago

> I think the choice of words here will be seen as laughable and antiquated in the future. Or we will see countries like Dubai, Malta, Cyprus and other tax havens as collaborators and sanction them into oblivion. Places that allow the rich to prevent themselves from being taxed by their home countries do not deserve existence. The amount of money laundered and stored away in tax havens is the money that used to fund social services, healthcare or living wages before the world allowed free and unimpeded movement of money. We need to get this money back under our control - if only to prevent social unrest from the 2/3rd of the US which have less than 1000$ in liquid savings.

celtain 4y ago
I don't understand why we need to specifically sanction tax havens. Unless rich people are making money in the tax havens themselves (in which case they're not just tax havens), we can just levy all the taxes we want before the money leaves our own borders.
- munk-a 4y ago
  Yup - in particular VAT tax evasion (i.e. a company putting a $2000 sticker on laptops when they pass through Bermuda) is something that the US could easily solve with a minimal cumulative VAT tax - it just chooses not to. The same corruption that leaves tax loopholes all over the place will prevent sanctions against tax havens - them existing is a desirable state by the corrupt that can purchase influence to perpetuate their existence.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Tax havens act as incentivizers for crimes - not just tax evasion, but also for routing around international sanctions or money laundering. We're punishing people who incentivize others to do criminal acts, so why should countries be exempt?
  - r0snd0 4y ago
    Could you explain that further? How do tax havens incentivize sanctions evasion or money laundering? As far as I can tell, they’re just the most attractive places for such activities thanks to their low taxes. Laundering your money in Scandinavia probably wouldn’t be more difficult, it’d just be more expensive.

work_ta_220503 4y ago

I used to be a libertarian, but reading about international organized crime made me realize we do need the state because these people won't be stoped by NAP principle-touting ideologues. financial havens definitely and provably assist in building organizations that can subvert governments, and not in favor of your freedoms I assure you.

vmception 4y ago
Whitelisting transactions is a fools errand and not a policy solution. If that leaves everyone with a void and absence of any policy solution, that's where we are.
cardosof 4y ago
I don't know if I laugh or cry at the naivety of libertarians talking about common people funding defense contractors to protect them from organized crime and foreign state-owned armies.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
11101010001100 4y ago
You can still be a libertarian, you just have to give up on property rights.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  So be an actual libertarian in the original sense of the word rather than a neofuedalist?
hkt 4y ago
It is a great pity that so many of those havens are shielded by western countries too. The UK has the crown dependencies (Jersey, Guernsey, various Caribbean holdings), the US has various vassal states (as I understand it), France is the same, then there are the microstates like Monaco. None of it could exist without the tacit consent of large countries that have legal or diplomatic sway over these jurisdictions.