What the #FIC is going on?

Johannesburg - After he died, it turned out that former Nigerian strongman Sani Abacha had $4.5bn (R63.5 billion) in his Swiss bank account – perhaps the most jaw-dropping evidence of looting on our continent, but not the only one.

Until global rules on money laundering were crafted, the canon of secrecy that governed banks, especially European and Swiss banks, was watertight.

It changed after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, when governments pushed to pierce the veil of secrecy to enable them to trace the funding of global terror.