“Corrupt capital” is a term that was coined by TI in 2015. It was designed to draw a distinction between funds and assets that are the proceeds of corruption or owned by corrupt individuals and other forms of money laundering and illicit financial flows. Campaigners argued that through providing a destination for the funds, global financial centres were acting as enablers of corruption, and disaggregating the corrupt capital aspect from illicit financial flows allowed them to shine a spotlight on this activity.

The funds are eye-catchingly large, although notoriously hard to measure. Through leaks such as the Panama Papers and through other investigations, large property transactions occasionally come into the public eye, such as Teodorin Obiang's $30 million Malibu mansion, or the £50 million London home of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. But what does the global total look like? An oft-cited figure for annual illicit financial flows is $1.26 trillion, although Wathne & Stephenson (2021) have described this as “problematic”, suggesting that an annual figure of around $660 billion is more credible. The UK Government's official statistics are that “the scale of money laundering impacting the UK is likely to exceed £90 billion a year”.

These statistics lump together illicit flows and money laundered from a variety of sources, including the activities of organized crime, such as drugs and human trafficking, and the proceeds of corruption. When the lid is lifted on the proceeds of corruption related to specific transactions or the assets of specific individuals, it is possible to gain the sense that the sums are large, but it is not possible to disaggregate the “corrupt” element from those global estimates. One approach to gain a sense of the scale is to analyse in detail a cross-section of known cases of corruption. TI has done this for the UK, examining over 400 cases of corruption from around the world with a UK connection (Transparency International UK 2019a). This revealed that the corrupt schemes had operated through 2,225 companies registered in the UK and its related territories, there were investments of £5 billion into 421 UK properties and that funds had been paid to 177 schools and other educational institutions.

TI's work illustrates how analysts and scholars have started to disaggregate corruption in their analysis of how the global financial system operates with regard to dark money.