World Venture Travel

Political corruption is the cancer of a society.  It breaks down the fiber of the economy, the moral of the people and the reputation of any given country wherein the leaders go about conduction their transactions in immoral and unjust ways.  This happens in the form of bribery and favors, in the prevention of the citizens access to the voting booths and in paying off politicians for votes and signatures on legislative bills.

One such case was recently investigated by the United Nations, and involve and election in Afghanistan that was suspected of being fraudulent and corrupted.  The investigative team spent hours late into the night last Thursday in the attempts to determining if a runoff election is necessary.  The suspicion lies within the fact that some of the polling stations reported a one hundred percent turnout of voters, which is highly unlikely in any political election, as well as the majority of those votes votes going to particular and singular clients.

Over three thousand stations were audited last Thursday, and these numbers are still be added up and analyzed, and individual cases of fraud are also being investigated.  Most analysts agree that it is most likely that there will be a runoff election in about two weeks, but the impending winter snow storms and the public unrest and the public insecurities may cause low attendance at the polls.

This is one of the many effects of political corruption, people will waver on the edge of just giving up.  Government officials state that both sides, the current President Hamid Karzai and his contender Abdullah Abdullah, should be willing to agree to a re-election.  In this way, to agree to this would serve to reinstate the public confidence and the reputation of the Government of Afghanistan and to the legitimacy of the character of current President Karzai.

The US Patriot Act was conceived in the months following the terrorist attacks in New York City, and one of the missions of the Act is to banish any means of the funding of terrorist cells, through the money laundering activities funneled through the financial institutions of the United States.  They serve to cooperate with and to inform the companies and the banking systems of the rules and the regulations, the policies and the procedures, and the laws that serve not only to stop cases of corruption and the laundering of money, but to protect the institutions themselves from being unknowingly taken advantage of.

Shell banks are usually foreign banks which have remained apart from and regulations, and the risk that these institutions pose, as far as the occurrences of terrorist financing and money laundering, on the rest of the world is great.  The US Patriot Act works to prevent these banks from having any contact or transactions with the American banking system, at all.  It is against the law for brokers and banks to deal with any business that does not have a presence that is a physical entity.

The American banks must take every precaution that they can to ensure that accounts held at their offices are not connecting to those that service and do business with these shell banks.  Law enforcement agencies have been given more authority over the methods and the means in which to ensure this as well.  They are focused on the identification and disruption of money laundering rings, in and effort to prevent such activities, and those surrounding the funding of terrorism.  The regulators, the institutions themselves and the various enforcement agencies have come together to cooperate and to share any information with regards to the people and/or the organizations that are committing these crimes.