NEW spring 2024 course: GBUS 4406/5406: Mody Seminar: Illicit Finance

IBD is pleased to host a new course offering in Spring 2024, GBUS 4406/5406: Mody Seminar: Illicit Finance, taught by Justyna Gudzowska. The course will examine international financial flows and how illicit funds are transferred or laundered across borders, for terrorist financing or investment in assets, and how that threatens the global financial system and undermines national security and human rights. The course is taught from a practitioner’s perspective, with a focus on the role of illicit finance in sustaining kleptocracies, enabling mass atrocities, and impeding development. The course is designed to be interactive and hands-on, using real-world case studies on topics such as the role of professional enablers and secrecy jurisdictions, new payment methods such as cryptocurrencies, and the latest techniques in sanctions evasion. Professor Gudzowska will delve into tools that governments, international bodies, and the private sector can use to combat illicit finance, an increasingly urgent and multi-trillion dollar problem, and why a multi-pronged and international effort is needed to tackle the problem.

Professor Gudzowska has spent her career combating financial crime: she served as the Director of Illicit Finance Policy at The Sentry, an investigative and policy organization that seeks to disable multinational predatory networks that benefit from violent conflict, repression, and kleptocracy. She was also the lead sanctions attorney for Morgan Stanley, overseeing the implementation of sanctions for the bank’s offices across the globe. From 2013-2018 she worked for the United Nations as part of an expert team advising the Security Council on countering the financing of terrorists, in particular ISIS and Al-Qaeda. Before the UN, she was a legal advisor to the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, where she advised on the full spectrum of economic sanctions issues in addition to several private sector positions.