After ten years, the president of the Supreme, minister Joaquim Barbosa, made a similar observation: he understands that banks have lenient control in the fight against the laundering crime and there may be problems in the polices and in the Prosecution Office.

President of the Federal Supreme Court accuses banks to be ‘lenient’ with money laundering
The crisis of the fight against money laundering is bigger. The root of the problem is in the lack of comprehension of the concept of the crime. Money laundering is a complex operation which purpose is to give legal appearance to assets, rights or values coming from crimes. The great challenge is to find out values declared to the authorities upon fraud that hides its real origin.

However, in Brazil, the concept was ignored and authorities, most of times, assesses only the concealment of the money resulted from the previous crime. Big mistake. The majority of the criminals hides the product of the crime and only a few commits to the laundering process.
When investigating only the concealment, which often is nothing but the depletion of the previous infringement, the real laundering goes unpunished, but the authorities have been satisfied with simple investigations, which stimulates impunity. There is no thorough investigation because polices, especially State ones, do not have appropriate structure.

The problem tends to get worse with the changes provided by the new law of 2012: before, only serious crimes could give rise to laundering, but now any criminal offense is capable of foster it; if we used to experience failure with a few crimes considered criminal records, it is obvious that it will be impossible to improve the scenario with such increase.

Focus got lost. It is the typical case in which ‘strengthening of the law’ should backfire.