A two-year campaign to create an effective law incentivizing whistleblowers to report money laundering and sanctions busting has ended with a stunning and surprise victory for whistleblowers. It started in December 2020 when Congress released the Conference Committee report on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The report contained a whistleblower law for AML violations. Initially greeted with strong praise, a leading expert in whistleblower law pointed out the law was full of loopholes, dangerously misleading, and would utterly fail. A December 7, 2020 column in The Hill said it all: “Big Banks get at Big Break in Pending Whistleblower Law.” On January 1, 2021, the banks won, and the whistleblowers lost. The flawed AML bill became law.
Time proved the expert was right; the law was a complete flop. The reason was simple. On the one hand, the NDAA-based Anti-Money Laundering law looked on its face similar to the highly effective Dodd-Frank Act. The cornerstone of the NDAA whistleblower law was a reward provision permitting the Secretary of Treasury to pay whistleblowers “up to” 30% of sanctions obtained. But whistleblower law experts pointed out that this reward provision was a trap and that glaring loopholes “doomed” the law. In fact, no rewards could be paid under the law. The reason was twofold. First, any payment was purely discretionary. The Secretary of Treasury could deny a whistleblower a reward, regardless of the quality of information or sacrifice,...
Police have launched an investigation into alleged false accusation by Park Cheol-min, a former member of the Seongnam International Mafia. Park, ahead of the 2022 presidential election, raised al...