Big-time criminals in a cul-de-sac

The one thing you can say about a former thorn in the side of apartheid, Peter Hain, is that he is consistent. He fought the National Party government with sports and other boycotts and he is still on the side of the majority of South African citizens as he fights the state capture project.

Now a member of the British House of Lords, Hain has taken the lead in pressuring the British government and its financial watchdogs to probe the vast, murky network of multinational money transactions involving the Gupta family and their allies.

In the House of Lords this week, he made allegations that international banks headquartered in the UK had allegedly turned a blind eye to questionable Gupta-linked money transfers in both Dubai and Hong Kong. That amounts to money laundering, a phenomenon which both the European and American authorities have vowed to crack down on. Hain’s bulldog tenacity has, effectively, resulted in the British authorities starting to do the work our own investigation and prosecutorial agencies cannot – or will not – do.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has, similarly, opened a probe into alleged illegal deals and money transfers involving members of the Gupta family who are American citizens. What both probes have in common – and Hain has said this plainly – is that the money involved in these sometimes enormous transfers has allegedly been milked from South African taxpayers.

The significance of these probes – and others like them of corrupt African politicians – is that the world has become a dramatically smaller place for cross-border criminals. Not only are there fewer places for them to hide, once their ill-gotten gains are tracked down, they can be seized and repatriated to the people from whom they were stolen.