Congress edges closer to cracking-down on anonymous shell corporations

OUT OF THE $4.5bn pilfered from 1MDB, a Malaysian state development fund, at least $1bn is alleged by American prosecutors to have been embezzled into the United States—spent in a Gatsby-esque frenzy on, among other things, a Manhattan penthouse, a Beverly Hills mansion and financing Hollywood films (including, naturally, “The Wolf of Wall Street”). America’s porous rules on anonymous shell companies make disguising the origins of money fairly straightforward. The Tax Justice Network, a good-government group, ranks America as the second-worst performer on its annual financial-secrecy index—ahead of famous tax havens like Switzerland and Luxembourg, and eclipsed only narrowly by the Cayman Islands. As recently as last year, American prosecutors were trying to wrest control of a 36-storey office building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, probably worth close to $1bn, on the grounds that it was secretly owned by the government of Iran, which is subject to some of the heaviest sanctions in the world.

Shell games such as these hide not only the penthouses of kleptocrats, but the financial networks for traffickers of arms, drugs and humans. Congress is on the cusp of making them harder to execute. The must-pass annual defence bill is slated to include legislation requiring companies to disclose to the Treasury Department’s enforcement division...