As a Brit, I've never had the sense the UK (specifically the City of London) has any genuine interest in tackling money laundering. I suspect our economy is structurally reliant upon us being extremely good at it.
I think the power is knowing who is moving what and where
Our money laundering supports freedom, while theirs supports tyranny etc.<p>I love the whole “unexplained wealth” concept the UK developed, curiously enough after Abramovich had been running around buying Chelsea etc. If you are friend to MI6 this week you are allowed to do anything, but if you get on their wrong side you will be Berezhovskied.
Really? What are you basing that on?<p>Having worked at FinTechs and in finance in general that doesn't ring true at all. The FCA definitely takes anti-money laundering checks quite seriously.<p>e.g. (off the top of my head) NatWest were fined £264 million for AML breaches.<p>I'm no expert by any means but if I wanted to flout the rules I'd definitely consider a few other juristictions before the City.
AML tech is so primitive, it almost looks like it's designed that anyone 'in the know' will know how to not be detected.<p>Eg. Most AML checks are done because someone wrote some triggering keyword in the payment reference field. Do we honestly think a criminal mastermind won't manage to come up with something else to write there?
The references are almost irrelevant. The banks + fintechs have far more depth than that.
The AML you are thinking of is designed to catch small time crooks and drug mules (and maybe also dumb terrorist supporters). They are not really designed (or more specifically deliberately obtuse towards) Slavic oligarch money. Not all "corruption" and money laundering are treated equally. Places like London (not to mention Jersey), Switzerland, and Singapore are more for good old fashioned siphoning-of-national-assets type of corruption where there's almost always a "clean" paper trail to back things up. Also, don't get tax dodging mixed with money laundering. There are plenty of processes required by OECD and similar orgs, e.g. the concepts of a LEI number, that are not really useful against real oligarch/state level money launderers.<p>Here's a simple example: You lived in a former USSR/iron curtain state. During the chaos of '89 you managed to "acquire" lots of assets or finagle yourself into owning former public companies/real estate/factories. The paper trail is clean as far as your typical London banks are concerned because you are merely liquidating assets you own in your own country where there's a full paper trail (regardless of whether it was attained through illegitimate means). Alternatively, in a different narrative, you a rich international student from similar types of countries and you just happened to have "rich parents" who have plenty of money to throw around. It's very different threat model than for example trying to prevent grassroots terrorism financing.<p>If you want an actual no-questions-asked romp of organized crime type of money I believe the current main contenders are the middle eastern states like Dubai (pre Iranian conflict at least).<p>Rumor through the financial grapevine is that there are many GCC middle eastern royalty/pseudo-royalty currently under house arrest who are trying to do the opposite i.e. get their assets out of the country because their main bank accounts are frozen domestically. So basically real life Nigerian princes.<p>(As for why they are under house arrest, it's kinda out of scope for HN but mostly because of domestic political purges, especially in Saudi Arabia from what I heard)
Isn't the whole point of the City of London, to be a legal money laundering economic zone, that brings banks, corporations, money and jobs to the UK?
<a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/search?searchTerm=palantir" rel="nofollow">https://hansard.parliament.uk/search?searchTerm=palantir</a>
Previously:<p>"<i>US to embed Palantir AI across military</i>" - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471655">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471655</a><p>"The singularity".
Are we seeing the beginning of super-corporations that will supersede nation states?
Feelings about Palantir aside, this is a really misleading headline. The FCA has hired Palantir to "investigate the watchdog’s internal intelligence data", which presumably requires Palantir to have access to that sensitive data.<p>Saying that Palantir is "reaching" into the British state, and then having the article image be "billionaire Donald Trump donor Peter Thiel" literally holding a wad of cash is... not exactly a high standard of reportage.
> literally holding a wad of cash<p>And that's the <i>most</i> believable thing in the image. From the banknotes, to the rather visible outline on Thiel himself, to what I can only describe as an out-of-focus picture of the supernatural entity from Still Wakes the Deep.
Guardian doing clickbaity headline specifically to infuriate their readers, I am shoketh
> Palantir has previously defended its work, saying it has led to about 99,000 extra operations being scheduled in the NHS<p>No hard evidence of this was provided or is readily available.<p>> helped UK police tackle domestic violence<p>And precisely how was this done?<p>> Palantir will have to destroy data after completion of the contract<p>Contractual obligations that are not practically enforceable will not be honored. I don't think these individual administrative agencies have the acumen necessary to correctly negotiate these contracts.
>And precisely how was this done?<p>Can't find the article atm, but it was basically pre-crime from Minority Report (without the pre-cogs, obviously). They looked at large datasets and built a predictive model, correlating things like race and prior criminal history to infer who was more likely to re-offend. At scale, this works. Ethical issues abound, however.
> At scale, this works.<p>We're going to need a definition of "works." The false positive rate seems to be notable since those stories readily percolate into media whenever these schemes are implemented and the damage done from those is absolutely massive.<p>The idea that criminals are likely to re-offend is not new. What to do about this has always been the challenge. Simply over policing this segment is not any type of solution. Unless, of course, you are invested in the "private prison" industry.
> [Palantir] The Miami-based company, co-founded by the billionaire Donald Trump donor Peter Thiel<p>And backed by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital (CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency of the US).<p><a href="https://fortune.com/2025/07/29/in-q-tel-cia-venture-capital-palantir-anduril/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2025/07/29/in-q-tel-cia-venture-capital-...</a>
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Alex Karp will be held accountable eventually. I can’t think of anyone more evil than that rat fucker