Lecture on “Ethics of money laundering in banking”

We are inviting you to the first lecture on “Ethics of money laundering in banking” delivered by Dr Yassine Bakkar from Queen’s University Belfast, UK.

Dr. Yassine Bakkar is an Assistant Professor of Finance at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses on financial economics, quantitative macroeconomics and empirical banking. His papers have been published in leading journals such as Journal of Banking and Finance; Journal of Financial Stability; Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions & Money.

The lecture is based on the paper framing a money laundering scandal as an opportunity to theorize on the dark side of “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR) quantification in “Environmental and Social Governance” (ESG) reporting.

It identifies three hypotheses as to whether ESG is developing for the better or for the worse CSR’s originally qualitative ideals: neutral CSR hypothesis, positive hypocritical CSR hypothesis, and negative hypocritical CSR hypothesis.

Using a novel cross-border payments dataset, the paper examines the dynamics behaviour of money laundering, CSR and ESG controversies of a sample of Nordic banks during the 2005‒2019 period. The findings raise critical questions against quantified and instrumental approaches in and around CSR, and bear policy implications for the improvement of corporate governance, particularly when it comes to CSR and ESG.