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According to wikipedia: Money laundering Money laundering is the practice of engaging in financial transactions in order to conceal the identity, source, and/or destination of money, and is a main operation of the underground economy.
So if a politician says, that he does not know the origin of the election financing, you could say that the source of the finance has been concealed. The methods that Finnish politics have used are: 1) Use support associations (1-3 levels). Now the companies can give money to first level general support association. Then the association gives the money to candidate's support association or party with a recommendation how to use it. If everything works, the politician "does not know" how gave him/her the money. 2) Sell paintings. Now this is quite traditional method. Buy something cheap and sell it with good price and the money looks clean. Politicians have also created a law, that they don't have to pay taxes if a single painting is cheap enough. So this can mean thousands of €uros of clean money. 3) Do some easy work and get payed with gold. How about talking garbage with €5000/hour? Sounds fair enough. Of course €5000 is a big sum, so it's better to talk shorter time for smaller bonus, so tax authorities "will not notice". (Of course they notice, but they were nominated by their friend so don't bite the hand that feeds you.) Now I wonder, if Finland's ranking as the lowest corrupted country will stay. And will I blog from the jail in the future.
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