RT Article
T1 Incorporating the Illicit: Assessing the Market Supply of Shelf Companies
JF European journal on criminal policy and research
VO 30
IS 3
SP 475
OP 501
A1 Paquet-Clouston, Masarah
A2 Lord, Nicholas
A2 Philibert, Jade
A2 Giese, Celine
LA English
YR 2024
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1914413873
AB Whilst inherently lawful, shelf companies enable the generation of contrived financial structures and arrangements that can facilitate actors to organise their criminal activities and conceal, convert, or control their illicit finances or assets. A stratified market for the purchase and management of such legal structures exists. At the lower end, greater accessibility to shelf companies is enabled by websites offering shell companies, or ready-to-go corporate vehicles, at various prices to anyone interested in setting up a company quickly in a preferred jurisdiction. Although these products have been considered as high-turnover and low-cost, their importance should not be underestimated. They lower barriers to entry to customers interested in concealing, controlling, and/or converting illicit finances domestically and transnationally. To gain insight into the nature and organisation of this market, this article provides a first overview of the online market for shelf companies by empirically analysing data scraped online that identified 296 online shelf company suppliers. The results highlight how some of shelf company suppliers are positioned in a way that is conducive to the facilitation of illicit activities; that there exist a diverse range of suppliers with varying sizes, scopes, and connections; and that the market is global, with a large variety of shelf company jurisdictions provided by suppliers.
K1 Company formation agents
K1 Money Laundering
K1 Online markets
K1 Shelf companies
DO 10.1007/s10610-024-09594-w