Welcome back to Trace's podcast, Bride, Swindle, or Steel. My guest today is an expert on the use or

abuse of anonymous shell companies and challenges around true beneficial ownership.

We've just been in the news a lot recently.

Gary Kelman is the executive director of the Financial Accountability

and Corporate Transparency Coalition, or the Fact Coalition,

based in Washington, D.C.

Gary, thank you so much for joining me.

I'm happy to be here.

People have a pretty good idea of what transparent beneficial ownership is, but what is the

alternative?

Can you sort of set the scene for us and describe what it is we are concerned about when we're

concerned about shell companies, anonymous companies?

Sure.

So the role of anonymous shell companies has come to the

forefront, I think, most recently because of the Panama papers, which people may remember

two years ago this month, actually. There was a massive leak from a law firm in Panama, which exposed a number of owners of companies that were previously anonymous.

What does that mean?

It means that when you set up a company in America and actually in many places in the world, you do not have to put your name on the paper.

Therefore, you could have anonymity which allows you not only

some legitimate privacy for certain folks, but for the vast majority of these entities, it's hiding

illegal or illicit money. This plays out in any number of ways. Let me explain a couple of examples.

So we learned from the Panama Papers, for example, that the Prime Minister of Iceland was actually, right after the financial crash, was negotiating bailouts for the banks in Iceland. It turns out that his wife was the owner of one of the banks that was getting

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