How money-laundering networks, private companies, and international trade sustain modern conflicts long after the first missile is fired
by Salvador Pimentel Roja
There is a naivety forgivable in the ordinary citizen, but unforgivable in the jurist: the belief that wars end when the armistice is signed. Nothing could be further from financial reality. Contemporary war is not a military phenomenon with economic appendages, but an economic phenomenon with military appendages, and that architecture, once built, is rarely dismantled. It simply changes clients. And that is where the danger begins.
Those of us who have spent years tracing corporate structures, particularly those of Venezuelans like Alex Saab, know how difficult it is to reach the ultimate beneficiaries of a capital flow. Beyond crossing half a dozen countries to erase the trail, that money can end up forming part of the so-called «Zapatero family jewels,» or landing in a seemingly innocuous account.
What operates here is not merely parallel infrastructure, but military contractors, financial intermediaries, maritime logistics, and the ever-popular shell companies, all activating cascading sanctions-evasion mechanisms.
They function with an efficiency that any finance ministry would envy. That infrastructure is not born of war; war simply gives it a new reason for being, a cash flow, and a patina of legitimacy that later proves extraordinarily difficult to strip away.
For decades, the dominant narrative presented armed conflict as a rupture of the normal economic order, an anomaly the market tolerates until imminent peace restores normalcy. The evidence has disproven that narrative: war does not interrupt financial markets, it reconfigures them, carving out new niches.
Sustained demand for transport, insurance, financial intermediation, and energy supply can only be met through illicit structures. Even once peace is announced in Iran, for instance, the Strait of Hormuz will remain a highly profitable maritime toll; it will simply change hands, remaining a business even as it slips into the shadow economy.
The result of these war-laundering chains is an industry with its own suppliers, its own supply chains, and, most disturbingly, its own systems for recycling capital. Once the original conflict has lost its media relevance, the chain stays in operation, ready to seek out new work.
FATF has insisted that international trade remains one of the most effective vectors for moving value between jurisdictions without triggering the alarms a conventional bank transfer would raise. Over-invoicing, under-invoicing, phantom merchandise, and duplicated bills of lading, however elementary as money-laundering techniques, remain astonishingly effective when applied at industrial scale and combined with hard-to-trace maritime shipping networks.
This is how the CLAP and PDVSA-Crypto schemes operated. It is here that the picture connects with the so-called «ghost fleets»: tankers of opaque ownership, registered under flags of convenience, that move sanctioned crude through ship-to-ship transfers on the high seas, disabled identification systems, and constant changes of name and flag.
Although today’s headlines point mainly to Russia and Iran, this matter of black-market oil — what Venezuelans call petróleo bachaqueado — is all too familiar to us. Ships have indeed been seized over it, as in the case of the M/T Skipper (formerly the Adisa), on December 10, 2025.
The problem isn’t confined to states; irregular organizations run their own black-market tankers too. Another recent case played out in the English Channel, where British forces intercepted a tanker identified as part of Russia’s shadow fleet. Ukraine’s foreign minister put it eloquently: «every detained vessel is less funding for the Russian war machine.» The phrase holds an uncomfortable truth — oil converted into hard currency is, in practical terms, ammunition.
The day after: when the war ends but the structure remains
Is it now clearer why the gravest danger is that this same infrastructure can end up financing terrorism? That is precisely what happens the day after: when the war ends, the structure — built to move weapons and dirty money — simply stays in place, ready to become terrorist ammunition.
The financial structures created, or adapted, to sustain an armed conflict or a complex legal situation such as international sanctions do not vanish when the conflict loses intensity or the leadership behind it changes. They remain: operational, tested, with known shipping routes, registered shell companies, open correspondent accounts, and operators — lawyers, accountants, ship captains, wealth managers — ready to keep working for new clients. They pay no attention to the ultimate beneficial owner (UBO), apply no compliance, hold no corporate ethics, and care little whether what they are moving is terrorism, narcotics, or weapons. They do the job, and they do it well, because they have already done it for entire countries, and they retain considerable power and protection.
Just a few weeks ago, OFAC lifted sanctions on several Venezuelan oil tankers flagged for flag-switching schemes, falsified corporate identities, and deliberately opaque navigation maneuvers. This is the very same maritime structure I have been describing. I should not be asking myself whether the financial structures built around those vessels will change purpose, but rather when, and for whom.
That is precisely the lesson financial criminology has spent decades trying to instill, without much success: evasion networks are loyal to no cause and no regime. They are loyal to money, and what matters to them is their own operational profitability. A shipping-and-banking network designed to move Venezuelan oil can, without much technical difficulty, move illegal-mining gold, narco-trafficking precursor chemicals, or cash. The infrastructure is endlessly upgradable to new purposes.
Can international law go on treating the financing of armed conflict as collateral damage, or must it evolve toward a liability regime that reaches directly those who design, operate, or profit from this infrastructure? The question is neither rhetorical nor academic. It is true that international criminal law has developed, through enormous effort, doctrines of liability for those who finance or facilitate drug trafficking, terrorism, or war crimes. It is equally true that near-total impunity persists, owing to the difficulty of evidence-gathering and the jurisdictional fragmentation in which these networks operate — which, combined with powerful connections, creates a de facto criminal shield.
The time has come for international law to stop pursuing only the illicit origin of funds, and to begin pursuing, with equal determination, the financial infrastructures that sustain conflicts.
Wars end, but financial structures simply change their letterhead. As long as the law keeps looking toward the battlefront and not toward the boardroom, we will keep winning wars in the headlines — and losing them, quietly, in the ledgers.