[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 185 (Thursday, October 21, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7144-S7145]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Pandora Papers

  Mr. CARDIN. Mr. President, I rise today to sound the alarm on the 
national security threat that corruption represents and to echo the 
determination President Biden made earlier this year that corruption 
constitutes a core national security threat to the United States.
  Along with many of my colleagues in this body, I have worked long and 
hard to fight corruption, which undermines democracy, human rights, and 
the rule of law and is behind so many of the persistent problems that 
we seek to solve.
  The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists--involving 
150 media outlets, including the Washington Post and the Organized 
Crime and Corruption Reporting Project--conducted an investigation of 
corruption leading to the publication of the Pandora Papers.
  The Pandora Papers reveal the astonishing extent to which 
questionable financial flows are entering our country and that of our 
allies. Those warrant further review. Although we had known that such a 
system of offshore financing exists, it is still shocking to see the 
scale of the corruption, documented in great detail by emails, 
contracts, and other documents.
  Foreign dictators, their associates, and other foreign officials have 
stolen untold sums--billions of dollars--and moved that dirty money 
into our democracies, into our real estate, bank accounts, trusts, and 
other financial instruments. This is a profound threat to our national 
security. It hollows out the rule of law abroad and now threatens to 
hollow out the rule of law at home.
  Foreign kleptocrats cannot do this alone. Although the kleptocrats 
may steal abroad, to taint our political system with that money 
requires the assistance of enablers--American lawyers, accountants, 
trust and company service providers, real estate professionals, and the 
like--who put aside any moral qualms that they may have

[[Page S7145]]

about working for the enemies of democracy to obtain a small slice of 
ill-gotten gains.
  The Pandora Papers make clear that U.S. enablers apparently play an 
outsized role in helping to move stolen assets from dictatorships and 
struggling democracies into consolidated democracies--an appalling and 
corrupt transfer of wealth from those who need it the most to those who 
have no need for it at all.
  All told, the Papers include documents from 206 U.S. trusts in 15 
States and Washington, DC, and 22 trustee companies.
  While there is obviously much legitimate business to be done in 
creating and managing trusts and investments--and we should be careful 
about overstating or generalizing without careful examination of each 
case--it appears that some Americans have knowingly played a 
significant role in facilitating corruption.
  The Papers include 300 political leaders and public officials from 
more than 90 countries and territories--although no Americans and 
exceedingly few Western Europeans. This comes as no surprise. The 
movement of corrupt money runs east to west, not west to east. It is 
the tragedy of the post-Cold War world that corruption has come west 
along with dirty money rather than democracy going east.
  There are names in the Papers that also come as no surprise, such as 
Vladimir Putin's cronies Konstantin Ernst and Gennady Timchenko. Both 
are included on Alexei Navalny's list of 35 human rights abusers and 
kleptocrats. Timchenko is already under U.S. sanctions, although Ernst 
is not. Now would be a good time to consider imposing sanctions on him. 
The Aliyevs of Azerbaijan also make an appearance. They collectively 
own a real estate empire in London worth $700 million. A Chinese 
Communist Party official also was found to have used an offshore 
company to trade in U.S. stocks.
  Now, here is the good news. It doesn't have to be this way. The 
triumph of global kleptocracy is not inevitable. We can fight back, and 
we are.
  Never before has there been an American administration so focused on 
countering such corruption or a Congress so creative and aggressive in 
facing down the threat. President Biden is the first President ever to 
declare countering corruption to be a core U.S. national security 
interest.
  Congress has formed a bipartisan Caucus against Foreign Corruption 
and Kleptocracy. The House recently passed no fewer than six different 
counterkleptocracy measures in the National Defense Authorization Act, 
which included bills I authored in the Senate. Now, it is incumbent 
upon us to do the same in the Senate and pass these bills.
  First is the Combating Global Corruption Act, S. 14, which would 
create a public and tiered country-by-country reporting requirement on 
compliance with international anti-corruption norms and standards. 
Those countries in the lowest tier of this report would have their 
leadership evaluated for Global Magnitsky sanctions. Then there is the 
Global Magnitsky Reauthorization Act, S. 93, which would reauthorize 
and enhance these critical sanctions for targeting global kleptocrats 
and human rights abusers--exactly the sort of people identified by the 
Pandora Papers.
  Just before the recess, I introduced S. 2986, a new measure with 
Senator Wicker, that would require the administration to evaluate the 
Navalny 35 for Global Magnitsky Sanctions. Russian opposition leader 
Alexei Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation, in a letter addressed to 
President Joe Biden earlier this year, called for the United States to 
impose sanctions on dozens of Russian oligarchs and government 
officials, whom it credibly accuses of political persecution, human 
rights abuses, and corruption. I agree with the Navalny team and urge 
the administration to move forward on this request.
  All three of these measures have been included in the House version 
of the NDAA--the National Defense Authorization Act--and I urge my 
colleagues to include them in the Senate version as well.
  The Pandora Papers are a wake-up call to all who care about the 
future of democracy. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, it is 
time for democracies to band together and demand an end to these 
unprecedented corruptions that has come to the defining feature of the 
global order. We must purge the dirty money from our system and deny 
kleptocrats safe haven. It will take hard decisions and difficult 
reforms, but we can get this done. We already have a bipartisan 
commitment momentum in order to accomplish these results. Now it is 
time that we see this through in the U.S. Senate.
  With that, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa is recognized.