Mapping illicit financial networks linked to actors in countries with weak rule of law: A global investment census approach

Attempts to empirically estimate international illicit financial stocks and flows have traditionally had to rely primarily on official datasets of macro-level international trade and investment. However, datasets of company ownership and financial data, such as Orbis, have increasingly brought into the realm of possibility a more ambitious approach to the
large-scale bottom-up assessment of illicit financial risks at the micro-level. Here we draw on a novel micro-level dataset of FDI in economies representing 75% of world GDP, to map
and analyze the illicit financial risks and architectures surrounding all significant identifiable international investments from 19 countries with weak rule of law—Afghanistan, Angola, Belarus, Bolivia, Cameroon, Djibouti, Guatemala, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Russia, Sudan, Tajikistan, Venezuela, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.