Moody’s Analytics has found 21 million “red flags” associated with shell companies that could be used to enable financial crimes, from ancient directors to dubious addresses.
For instance, more than 2,200 companies have directors aged 123 years and above, despite the fact that the oldest known human lived to 122, said Richard Graham, a director at Moody’s Analytics, in research published Monday. One listed director — at 942 years old — would have been born in the 11th century.
So do these shell companies get investigated once they see an anomaly? Or is it a case of “whoops we forgot to update our current CEO. Thanks for the reminder.”
A small fine and a finger wag will be the result of extensive investigation into these errors.
I was thinking a strongly worded e-mail. Possibly a letter, but let’s not go crazy.
Nothing written, just verbal warning is “given”.
Unlike the ‘verbal’ warnings at my company. Which are written, and submitted to HR.
Probably nothing happens at all.
Those pieces of shit dodge taxes while the rabble pays them like shit. Thiefs
what are the chances that it’s the default MS Excel date of 01/01/1900 in most cases?
the 942 year old guy could be a mangled date format? maybe someone whose date was to have been recorded as October 1981 and the 10 and 81 got stored as the year?
yeah I’d rule out MS Excel date errors before really buying the conclusions in thia article.
Though that wouldn’t explain the other odd things mentioned like the thousands of companies listing their address as the Egyptian pyramids, 1 guy holding thousands of roles at thousands of companies, companies listing only 1 employee that have billions in revenue, etc
it wouldnt, sure. and im not referring to those inconsistencies at all.
when it comes the dates specifically observed in the article though, as anyone who’s worked with Excel will attest, date calculation errors cannot be ruled out until they are explicitly, well, ruled out.
it very much is in the realm of possibility that all other data is accurate and date errors still manifest themselves.
So this is how immortals have been getting away with things.
Moodys? You mean the pay-to-win rating company that nobody regulates?
It may be the same Moody’s, I can’t tell, but they have a different domain name and have a long list of departments including investments and portfolio management, compliance/KYC, supplier risk management, and many others. They are a large financial services company. https://www.moodysanalytics.com/
Regardless, this is a very interesting investigation.
Moody’s Analytics is a subsidiary of Moody’s Corporation. The Moody’s Investor Services is all part of the overall Moody’s.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Moody’s Analytics has found 21 million “red flags” associated with shell companies that could be used to enable financial crimes, from ancient directors to dubious addresses.
Atypical directorship is just one of seven key behaviors highlighted in the research, including mass registration, dormancy and circular ownership.
While new regulations across the world are looking to improve transparency at shell companies, there is still some way to go, with $1.6 trillion laundered annually, according to data from Moody’s Analytics.
“Organizations today face mounting complexity in understanding true ownership structures and detecting risky corporate relationships,” said Ted Datta, head of the financial crime compliance practice for Europe, Africa and Americas at Moody’s Analytics.
While shell companies might have legitimate purposes, their opaqueness is often use to hide criminal financial activity, Moody’s Analytics said.
Other red governance flags included jurisdictional risk, outlier ultimate beneficial ownership and financial anomalies, it said.
The original article contains 342 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 57%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Or maybe just sloppy vampires?
Hanlon’s razor tells us we should just assume stupid vampires :D
