CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

deal, has to interact with a foreign counterpart. Every other method requires
interfacing with some other person locally, whether an accountant or codirector
or banker or government official or black-market money changer.
But varying prices in collaboration with an external trading partner does not.
Involving someone else locally risks that the illegal shift of money becomes
known by other shareholders, managers, workers, trade unions, tax collectors,
even the public. Dealing only with a foreign counterpart avoids this risk.
The first tool you want to reach for in your dirty-money user kit is the
tried and true technique of billing otherwise legitimate transactions at false
prices. With this method under your belt, you are already in the pros.
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Playing the Game 33
Concocting bogus prices does require you to have that conversation or communication
with your foreign trading partner. Many people don’t want to
do even this, don’t want that person or company to know anything about
their shifts of money. Whether it’s a first-time transaction or a long-term relationship,
many would prefer that these trading partners, maybe also
friends, do not know all the ins and outs of company or personal financial
affairs. If you, too, would like to utilize sham pricing while avoiding these
discomforting interfaces with your suppliers or customers, no problem. All
it takes is a reinvoicing company that will buy, change prices, issue a new
commercial invoice, and resell. In other words, the transaction isn’t made directly
with you; it’s made with this intermediary company, which buys or
sells on your behalf, marks the transaction up or down as you require, and
then sends the new paperwork on to the other end. With this reinvoicing
entity, comprised of a computer, a letterhead, and a bank account, you’ve accomplished
your false pricing and never had to discuss it with your foreign
counterpart.
A major U.S. soft drink company has a franchise bottler in Africa
owned by noncitizens of that country, a relationship that has lasted for a
half-century. At some point, the African bottler formed such a reinvoicing
entity in England. The U.S. soft drink company shipped the syrup used to
make the soda directly to Africa but sent invoices to the reinvoicing company
in England. This entity marked up the price of the syrup by several
times its original cost and sent the revised commercial invoices to its African
bottling operations in time to meet the arriving shipments of syrup. The