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The next big scam: carbon dioxide
Patricia Adams
Financial
Post
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Attempts to create markets for tradeable CO2 are shaping up
to be the next Oil-for-Food-sized fraud.
Deloitte Forensic calls it “the white collar crime of
the future.” Kroll, a business risk subsidiary of Marsh
& McLennan, the global professional services firm, calls
it “a fraudster’s dream come true.”
These two global financial services firms are referring to
carbon trading markets, a business that is estimated to explode
from $132-billion in 2009, mostly in the European Union, to
$3-trillion by 2020 as jurisdictions around the world join in
carbon trading, part of the “cap and trade” system
that governments are embracing.
Under cap and trade, companies need permits for the right to
emit CO2 as part of their operations. The permits, in effect,
guarantee that excess carbon emissions will be “offset”
by third parties that will, for example, sequester carbon by
growing trees. These permits, which are being traded on carbon
exchanges, akin to stock exchanges, have caught the attention
of law enforcement officers, who have seen an upsurge in fraud.
Says Chris Perryman of Europol’s Criminal Finances and
Technology section in The Hague, in referring to the $7.4-billion
in fraud that have occurred in the last 18 months in the EU’s
carbon market: “It is clear that [carbon trading] fraudsters
are fully aware of the potential that trading in intangible
commodities has to further their ends. Such goods or services
can be traded without the need to be physically moved or transported,
which represents an obvious opportunity to frustrate Law Enforcement
efforts to track and trace transactions.” So much fraud
has been occurring that, Europol estimates, up to 90% of all
carbon market volume in some EU nations was related to fraudulent
activities.
Full
article here
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