Between 2020 and 2022, Singapore police investigated more than 19,000 suspected “money mules” who might be using their accounts to move drug money. About 250 were prosecuted, police told local media. Somehow, however, while authorities found the time to investigate 19,000 suspected money mules, they appear to have been unable for a much longer time to find Marimutu Sinivasan, Ulung Bursa, Atang Latief, Lidia Muchtar, Omar Putiray, Adisaputra, James Januardi and Agus Anwar.
Those were the names of eight former Indonesian bankers who, according to Tempo Magazine in 2007, were believed to have stashed US$191.2 million in Singaporean banks and were living in the island republic. In fact, 18,000 Indonesians described as “rich” were living in Singapore worth a combined total of US$87 billion – more than Indonesia’s entire annual government budget. The Indonesians wanted their money and their bankers back. They never got them. Today, that figure is believed to have grown into the hundreds of billions of dollars, with nearly 40,000 high net worth Indonesians living in the country. While only a relatively small number may have moved stolen money across the Malacca Strait, there are plenty that should have raised suspicions under international Know Your Customer strictures recommended by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the primary global standard setter for bank regulation.
And Indonesians are far from alone. As has been reported numerous times, Zimbabwe’s former President Robert Mugabe, the late Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos, the jailed Taiwanese President Chen Shui Bian, the disgraced former French Budget Minister Jérôme Cahuzac, the now-deposed former Myanmar strongman Thien Sein, the jailed former Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and many more have been identified as keeping stolen money in Singapore banks with impunity…
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