AC Leaders Featured in New Podcast on Anti-Money Laundering Tools
September 23, 2024
The U.S. Art Market Remains a Safe Haven for Criminals, But Solutions Exist
In 2023, the global art market was valued at $65 billion. It remains the largest unregulated market in the world, making it vulnerable to a wide range of financial crimes.
On September 18, Antiquities Coalition Chair and Founder Deborah Lehr and Executive Director Tess Davis were featured on the The AML Conversations podcast.
The AML Conversations podcast aims to inform professionals and those interested in anti-money laundering (AML) about conversations happening in the government, private sector, and internationally. The podcast’s host, John Byrne, e-published Protecting the Art Market from Financial Crime: The Need for Action Now, which presents additional recommendations to protect the art market. He also served as a Chair of the AC’s Financial Crimes Task Force.
Together, Lehr and Davis provided expertise on how cultural artifacts have been and continue to be used to move illicit funds. In particular, the pair advised AML professionals on the most recent changes to legislation and how to apply them.
In 2021, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 (NDAA), in an effort to close regulatory loopholes that have made the American art market one of the largest unregulated markets in the world. This act removed antiquities dealers’ exemption from what are now standard anti-money laundering (AML) laws.
However, antiquities dealers are just part of a much larger art market. Lehr remarked that the art market remains a “sanctions black hole.”
In her 2024 Financial Times Op Ed, Lehr explores how Russian Oligarchs Arkady and Boris Rotenberg evaded U.S. sanctions to launder at least $18 million through the U.S. financial system. Childhood friends of President Vladimir Putin, the Rosenbergs control billions of dollars in contracts and investments tied to the Kremlin. In light of this sanctions black hole, Lehr emphasizes the urgent need for anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-terrorist financing (CTF) protections in the American art market.
It is critical that Congress apply the BSA to all dealers in cultural property, as, again, it has already done for all other sectors of comparable risk and scale.
Listen to the AML Conversations podcast, here.
Learn more about the 2021 Congressional Act on AML for antiquities dealers.
Revisit Lehr’s Op Ed in the Financial Times, “The US art market is a sanctions black hole.”