Leonardo DiCaprio is aiding the investigation into a Malaysian embezzlement scam that involved his hit film about financial market fraud, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” AFP reports:
The Hollywood star contacted the US Justice Department in July just after it filed a lawsuit to seize more than $1 billion in allegedly ill-gotten assets tied to Malaysian state investment fund 1MDB, including rights to the film, DiCaprio’s spokesperson said…. The move to seize the funds, which is subject to what could be lengthy legal proceedings, emerges from a 2010 Justice Department anti-kleptocracy initiative intended to confiscate the ill-gotten gains of world leaders which pass through the US banking system.
Many of the autocratic regimes threatening the U.S. and its allies are structured as kleptocracies, the Hudson Institute adds:
Criminal elites are misappropriating public funds and aid payments on a massive scale, undermining democracy in other countries by exporting corruption, and threatening global stability through territorial expansionism. Kleptocracies thrive on the vast shadow economy revealed by the Panama Papers and other recent scandals, and facilitated by unscrupulous lawyers, bankers, lobbyists, and other professional “enablers.” Despite this, our leaders have so far failed to recognize the true nature of these regimes and acknowledge Western complicity.
On October 20, join Hudson Institute’s Kleptocracy Initiative for the launch of The Kleptocracy Curse: Rethinking Containment, a new report by journalist Ben Judah, which offers a definitive account of kleptocracy as a pervasive global phenomenon and lays out the policies needed to defeat it. An expert panel discussion on this insidious threat to democracy, the rule of law, and national security features Charles Davidson, Benjamin Haddad, Ben Judah, Karen Dawisha, Hannah Thoburn [a Penn Kemble fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy], and Thomas Firestone.
Thursday October 20th, 2016 9:30am to 12:00pm RSVP
