The Layering track dissects the specific corporate, legal and banking instruments used to obscure the audit trail: shell and shelf companies, nominee directors, trust structures, tax havens, jurisdictional arbitrage and the mechanics of correspondent banking. You will learn to reconstruct hidden ownership from fragmentary registry data.
Modules
Shell companies, nominees and the corporate veil
How anonymous corporate structures are built, why they are so effective, and how to pierce them.
Correspondent banking and wire chains
Dissects the plumbing of cross-border payments; nostro/vostro relationships, nested correspondents, message-field forensics and the 2025 revisions to payment transparency, and shows how de-risking has reshaped African corridors.
Crypto and virtual-assets layering
Covers VASP obligations, mixers and chain-hopping, cross-chain bridges and stablecoin rails, the travel rule's uneven global rollout, MiCA, CARF/DAC8, and the evidential strengths and limits of on-chain tracing.
Professional intermediaries and layering logistics
Examines the gatekeeper professions that design and operate layering schemes, trust and company service providers, nominee networks, and law-firm client accounts; the legal-privilege boundary carved out by the CJEU, and how layering is actually project-managed as a service.
Cash, informal value transfer and mobile money
Examines the cash-heavy end of laundering typologies most familiar to Southern and East African practitioners — front businesses, hawala settlement, mobile-money agent networks and bulk cash smuggling. Builds the investigative techniques needed where the paper trail is thin and the value trail is mostly physical or informal.