Naomi Fowler: Hello and welcome to the Taxcast from the Tax Justice Network, a monthly podcast about corruption, tax abuse, financial secrecy, and how we fix it. I’m Naomi Fowler. Coming up later: the outsized influence of the secretive Catholic Institution of Opus Dei from Spain’s dictator Franco, right up to the present day:

Gareth Gore: This, this kind of sounds a bit like a bit of conspiracy theory but it’s, it’s, it’s, trust me, it’s very real. It’s in every major city around the world and it’s quite ruthless. It’s close to the Trump regime because they share a lot of common ground.

Naomi Fowler: I’ll talk to journalist Gareth Gore and author of Opus: the Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking and Right Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church.

Before that, some news from the United States. There’s been an epic battle to end anonymous ownership in the States. As we covered in the Taxcast episode 151 called ‘Ending US Financial Secrecy,’ for a while, the Corporate Transparency Act seemed to be on track until it wasn’t. Then it was, then it wasn’t. There was a deadline of January the 1st 2025 for eligible companies to file very basic information, identifying their owners and company owners were starting to submit their details to the register.

But the Trump administration has basically, in several moves, kind of dismantled the Corporate Transparency Act and the US’s financial regulator, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, has announced that only foreign businesses with foreign owners will now be required to report ownership information to the federal government. And it announced plans to actually delete ownership information that what they’re calling ‘US companies’ have already submitted. Hmm. I spoke to Erica Hanichak of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition:

The United States has been the world’s worst offender on our Financial Secrecy Index, has been for a long time. So I wanted to ask you what the consequences are now that you see the United States going further and further out of line when you see so many other countries are slowly adopting beneficial ownership regulations and registries.

Erica Hanichak: Yeah, so despite the size of the US economy being the world’s reserve currency, uh, at least for the dollar, with the new decision, the US is making a commitment to stay at the back of the pack compared to the rest of the world. More than 130 countries have either made advances on beneficial ownership transparency, or have otherwise made pledges to make this, information available to law enforcement and in some cases public, and the United States is making a commitment to not move forward with that the way that other major economies in the world have. Not only does this hurt US efforts to protect US national security, it really complicates efforts to cooperate with international law enforcement in cases of serious tax evasion or other efforts to counter transnational criminal networks.

You know, is there an opportunity for the US to change course on this? One of the things that we’re looking at internationally is the fact that the US will be facing a mutual evaluation by the Financial Action Task Force next year, that’s the international anti-money laundering standard setter, and beneficial ownership is a core component of its 40 recommendations to prevent illicit finance and terror financing and so we hope that the US will get a fair evaluation. And the truth is we’re really behind on getting good marks on that.

Naomi Fowler: Yeah. I mean, it, it, it should kind of drop into the grey zone, I would imagine. And in terms of legality, do you consider that it’s legally sound for FinCEN to be deleting this data so far that’s been submitted?

Erica Hanichak: Well, the decision to delete the data doubles down on what we consider an unlawful act to exempt these entities in the first place.

Naomi Fowler: So have you got hopes to salvage this situation because there’s been so much brilliant work over so many years, we’ve watched the United States move closer and closer towards these, uh, transparency standards, only to have everything dashed. Do you have any hopes or is it a case of waiting until the end of this…period of power, I’m trying to think of the right wording because I’m not entirely sure that I can say the next elections.

Erica Hanichak: Well, what’s interesting when you look at the language of the Corporate Transparency Act, the US beneficial ownership law is that the administration, regardless of which administration is only allowed to make exemptions to reporting that do not serve the public interest for one, and that would not prove highly useful for law enforcement intelligence or national security purposes, and we’ve seen across the board in the 10 year long bipartisan campaign to pass the Corporate Transparency Act in the first place, but also in the comments and reactions to the decision to exempt domestic entities that really it’s the very voices that are calling for are law enforcement, are national security officials, and so there’s enough grounds to really expect that this decision is, is unlawful. Not only in the actual language of the statute, of the bipartisan law passed by Congress, but also in the executive branch’s constitutional responsibility to take care of the laws passed by the US Congress so there are definitely grounds for challenge. And when it comes to the decision that the administration has made, it’s in a state of interim final rule. That means that the regulation is in effect, exempting 99.96% of the entities that were supposed to report under the law, but that they still have to make it final, which we expect will happen by the end of this year. And the administration has the opportunity to change course, so it would really behoove the administration to take into account all of the different positions submitted in the comment period from law enforcement, anti-corruption groups, national security folks, tax law experts, to restore reporting as it was intended by the statute.

Naomi Fowler: Right. New regulation that would limit this data collection to so-called foreign owned entities. How would that work? Because it is so easy for non-US citizens to incorporate in the United States, um, it’s not clear to me how they would separate those?

Erica Hanichak: Yeah, I mean the interim final rule is in effect, so this is the, the standing provision that would exempt and, and only limit it to those foreign entities, foreign owners, so again, that’s only .04% of the reporting that was supposed to traditionally happen. So down to about 12,000 entities out of the 33 million that we expected to report in the first year of the law’s implementation. So with that, you’re right, I mean, you know, exempting all these entities effectively nullies the statute, you know, it’s really hard to enforce, to understand which entity is foreign owned and just registered in the US, which companies that within that only have foreign owners and no US beneficial owners, that’s gonna be something impossible for FinCEN to monitor. And not only that, it’s such a rare instance, we’ve spoken with lawyers that have said they’ve never in their entire life really seen an instance like this. So this is almost even kind of a hypothetical kind of category, it’s not the traditional form of business that most entities would pursue, or honest business owners, and so we really do see an opportunity here to challenge this decision and try to bring the full force of the Corporate Transparency Act back.

Naomi Fowler: What is motivating this, in your opinion? Um, is this very much about the belief that it’s good for business to allow anybody to incorporate as easily as possible, or are there darker motives?

Erica Hanichak: The administration has said that this is motivated by an effort to deregulate US business operations to make it easier for businesses to comply with the law and not have to jump through as many hoops. I think a law that requires businesses to name four bits of information on their true owner, their name, date of birth, their street address, and a copy of their driver’s license or other state government issued id, uh, not necessarily rocket science in terms of complying. And they only have to report once unless their ownership changes. So this was never truthfully a matter about business burden. The law had opponents and I think they just caught good ears, uh, you know, listening ears this time around.

This decision creates an opportunity for abuse in ways that promote corruption, in ways that promote the undermining of US national security, and the flow of illicit finance into the US financial system. So there are big stakes here with this decision.

Naomi Fowler: Big stakes indeed, we’ll continue to monitor those developments on the Taxcast. My thanks to Erica Hanichak of the Fact Coalition for joining us.

This news, along with the rolling back of other corruption protections in the United States, really puts into context the nation’s slide even further into a kind of out and out bandit country. And it may seem surprising, but Catholic Institution Opus Dei is one of various conservative forces in the States that have had a key role in that very long term shift against rulemaking in the public interest. I’ve got journalist Gareth Gore with me. He’s author of Opus: the Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking and Right Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church. He writes and I’m quoting, ‘Opus Dei is a danger to itself, it’s membership, the church and the world.’ It’s quite a dark story.

Gareth Gore: The truth is I never actually set out to write a book about Opus Dei. I mean in my day job, I’m a financial journalist and I have been a financial journalist for like, the past 20 years and, you know, I’m used to writing about banks and big companies and kind of money flows around the world. What happened was in 2017, I was sent to report on this bank in Spain that collapsed, a bank called Banco Popular, which was at the time one of the largest banks in Spain. And you know, at this stage in 2017 we had kind of 10 years of rolling crisis around the world, you know, umpteen banks had already failed. So it kind of seemed like the same old story of, you know, bank executives having taken too many risks, hadn’t really got their hands on the problems quickly enough, they’re in denial, and then it all kind of just became too big a problem for them to grapple with and everything collapsed. But so much about it just didn’t really make sense and I became particularly interested in the ownership structure around the bank and it seemed very unusual to me and I just found this crazy story.

Basically what I discovered was that this bank had been secretly controlled by Opus Dei for about 60 years before it collapsed, that they’d siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars to finance this huge network of political influence and kind of religious manipulation, you might say, around the world. And yeah, I mean it was such a compelling story, I just had to write it.

Naomi Fowler: Yeah. Uh, and we’ll get to the political and religious influence in a bit. It seems that Banco Popular helped finance human trafficking of young girls and women from very poor backgrounds to work basically as slaves in these centres, cleaning and cooking for men, Opus Dei members, what they call numeraries, living in centres around the world. Opus Dei denies that allegation.

Gareth Gore: Yeah, This is where the bank was key. The bank helped to fund this whole network around the world of what were called hospitality schools. And these were recruitment centers for underprivileged girls. What would happen were, was that in these from places like Argentina, Kenya, the Philippines, in Europe at some stage as well in Belgium and France, Ireland, too, these schools would go out to the countryside and look for girls who were like 12, 13 years old. And they would basically pitch them and their parents, they would give them all these false promises of like, look, if you send your daughter off with us, we can give her this great education in the big city, you know, it’s, it’s a great way to get a job in the world of hospitality, she’ll get all this training, she’ll work to all these qualifications. And of course, once these girls, and I repeat, you know, they were like 12, 13 years old, once these girls were taken away from the families and they were boarding at these schools, well, communication back with the outside world is, is very kind of controlled. They would then be pushed coerced into joining Opus Dei as these, as these numerary servants. And, you know, effectively what Opus Dei was doing was building this network of free labour all around the world. And then once the girls were trained, they’d be sent off – this is the human trafficking element of it, they would be sent off from where they were trained and groomed in Argentina or, or, or the Philippines or whatever and then transported to Europe or North America where there was a shortage of this kind of person to cook and clean. And the sweet irony here is that the kind of in the uprising that we’ve seen in recent years from former members of Opus Dei who finally realised, you know, the abuse that they were subjected to and the suffering that they’ve endured, the backlash, the fight back’s actually come from these underprivileged girls, women are the ones that are rising up and the ones that have put together this case so there was a group of 43 women in Argentina. They got together, they found a lawyer who himself was a former numerary, so he kind of understood the system and, and took them on. They filed a complaint and that was taken on by the public office for human trafficking in Argentina. They launched a two year investigation and public prosecutors, just last year decided there was absolutely a case to be heard here. They formally accused Opus Dei of human trafficking, of the systematic targeting of these young girls and coercing them into joining. And there’s set to be a court case in Argentina, so yeah, I mean, I will be watching that.

Naomi Fowler: Yes. And um, back to Banco Popular, I spent a lot of time in Madrid and I remember those branches across the city. What you really need if you’re financing something like this is financial secrecy and being able to load up a bank with shareholders who are your own followers, who will basically vote in favour of whatever the board proposes. They controlled the bank through what they called The Syndicate. And there’s all sorts of the usual structures and activities that we see with the Tax Justice Network, with offshore foundations and layering and financial secrecy used to obscure direct involvement in different things around the world.

Gareth Gore: Yeah, I guess you probably come across this time and time again as well. You have these kind of nefarious players who create these schemes to hide what they’re doing. When I started looking into it, after the collapse of the bank, almost all the shareholders who lost everything, they got together in various groups and they tried to bring forward these legal cases to try and get some of their money back. They were trying to sue various people, trying to recoup the billions that they’d lost. So, I contacted a lot of these groups and all of them were very happy to talk to me, I mean, I was working for a global financial magazine at the time, they were keen to get some coverage for this fight that they were taking forward in the European Court of Justice and elsewhere. All of them were very happy to talk to me. Apart from one shareholder, which was this, this grouping called The Syndicate. And they were the biggest shareholder in the bank. So they owned about 10% of the bank when it went under, a stake that was worth about $2 billion at its peak, that had gone from $2 billion to zero and yet they didn’t seem to be keen on either fighting what had happened in the courts and shedding light on what had gone wrong and why they should get the money back. And so I started to really dig into this, this syndicate, and what I found was that it was, it was a kind of a group of all of these various charities and nonprofits, which on the face of it didn’t seem to have anything to do with each other. But once you kind of started to lay these companies out alongside each other, there were all these weird similarities. So most of them were registered to this very same address and they, they almost seemed to have this kind of rotating cast of directors as well that would sit on the board of one company and then they would shift to the next and the next and you know, all of these red flags kind of going off on me, and I then started to make connections between these companies and various Opus Dei projects around the world. And so it started to become clear to me that they, they were connected to Opus Dei, and that they were a way, I guess, for Opus Dei to collect what until 2017 had been this steady flow of dividends, almost a hundred million dollars a year going through these companies and then they would channel this money to various Opus Dei projects around the world.

These companies that made up the Syndicate were run by Opus Dei members. These are people that quite frequently have taken on kind of vows of, of celibacy and poverty and obedience to the movement, so many, many of these people, and I’ve spoke to many, um, of these types of people, you know, in the course of reporting, they’re people that basically take orders, they’re told what to do and, and they were the faces, they were the directors in charge, supposedly in charge of these companies, but they were taking orders from higher up, being told how to manage those stakes and what to do with the money. So yeah, I mean that’s the pattern that you see time and time again, right? I mean, you have these shell companies around the world that pretend they’re independent and they have an independent board of governors, when in fact there’s someone, you know, some hidden kind of force or person or group calling the shots.

Naomi Fowler: Yeah. And as the book goes on, you see why they want that deniability. And they say themselves I think that there’s 90,000 practicing, according to them, members of Opus Dei. And about 9,000 are living in these kind of centres they’ve established around the world who have taken these vows of celibacy and obedience and, it’s just so interesting to see that any numerary who travelled abroad was expected to sign several blank sheets of paper before leaving on any trip.

Gareth Gore: Absolutely. Members are given a certain amount of freedom. They might be sent abroad on trips or whatever, but you know, at least until, you know, until relatively recently, they were expected to sign blank pieces of paper before they left so that, you know, if they went to abroad and cause trouble or, or, or let the guard down or kind of gave away some kind of secret, they could do whatever it wanted to with these blank signed pieces of paper. They could write a resignation note or whatever and there’s one instance that I recount in the book where this guy’s found in, in Venezuela with a suitcase full of money, a quarter of million dollars. In the early 1960s, it was a huge amount of money back then. And lo and behold, these kind of signed bits of paper were, were used to distance what had happened from, Opus Dei to give them deniability.

Naomi Fowler: Yes, so they seem to have a track record of using techniques like the signed blank pieces of paper to safeguard their reputation among other things. And what’s also interesting about Opus Dei is how close they’ve been to dictatorships and autocratic regimes. You trace in the book the rise of Opus Dei right from the setting up of their very first centre in Madrid.

Gareth Gore: Yeah, according to the Opus Dei marketing, you know, this is a deeply Christian organisation, yet the most successful relationship it had with any kind of regime was with the Franco regime, at least perhaps up until recently, we’ll see what happens under Trump, Trump Mark Two but, um, it was, it was very happy to cosy up to this regime, this brutal dictatorship. You know, Franco murdered tens of thousands of his political opponents during peace time, this is after the war. He locked hundreds of thousands of people up in concentration camps. He was sending left leaning people off to the Nazis to be experimented on because the Nazis were hunting for this kind of ‘red gene.’ And so he willingly offered up Spanish citizens to be experimented on by the Nazis. The founder of Opus Dei gave private retreats for Franco and his and his wife. I discovered these previously unreported letters between Opus Dei and the Franco regime where Opus Dei was basically offering to infiltrate the working classes so that it might report on subversive elements and stuff, you know, it was deeply embedded in this regime. You know, it was a deeply un-Christian thing to do.

But I think, you know. Opus Dei is very kind of practical and, and it’s quite ruthless. It, it doesn’t really care who it’s, who it [inaudible] as long as it can push forward this its agenda. And, because of the kind of politics that the group espouses and the kind of politics that its founder had, it’s much more likely that kind of reactionary or, or kind of, or even fascist regimes are much more likely to be aligned with its worldview. It’s no surprise that in Latin America in the 1970s, it was very close to a number of the military regimes there, it’s no surprise that it’s close to the Trump regime these days because they share a lot of common ground on many of these issues. And Opus Dei, its founder certainly in his writings, was quite clear that the ends justify the means. And that’s the basis of an authoritarian regime, you know, we can do away with checks and balances and we can do away with due process. We can do away with the rule of law because actually what we’re aiming for is the most important thing and these other things can kind of go by the wayside. It’s a kind of and an alignment of ruthlessness and an alignment of political interest, I think.

Naomi Fowler: Mm. Yeah. And it’s interesting the, the anti-tax movement connections as well, because I saw that Sam Brownback is in your book, who is the Kansas Senator largely responsible for these massive disastrous tax cuts in Kansas, which I think Kansas still hasn’t recovered from. And I, I covered him on, uh, the Taxcast er quite a while ago, and I had no idea that there was an Opus Dei connection, where, McCloskey, the Opus Dei priest challenged a group of senators and changed Sam Brownback’s life at that moment. He said, uh, “how many constituents do you have? 4 million, 9 million, 12 million, um, came the answers from around the room. May I suggest, the priest replied, that you have only one constituent?” And this is the moment that changed Sam Brownback’s life. It’s just so interesting how sociopathic beliefs tend to go hand in hand with financial secrecy, tax abuse activities and conservatism. Anti-gay, anti-tax, anti-woman, anti-feminist, you name it, anti-reproduction rights, that always seem to go together.

Gareth Gore: Yeah and of course the one constituent is, is, is is God, right? I mean, he’s McCloskey is saying, yeah, yeah, fine, you guys were all elected by all these millions of, of, of voters. But what you need to do is cast aside the interest of your voters. And actually what you need to strive for and work towards is, you know, this kingdom of God and you know what, what God wants. That’s the most important thing here.

And Sam Brownback, he was actually converted to Catholicism by Father C John McCloskey who was known as the convert maker and he converted a number of senators and some very powerful figures in Washington and, and really helped Opus Dei to build its network out among people like Brownback.

Naomi Fowler: Yeah, and Banco Popular, it collapsed and that was obviously a real blow for Opus Dei. They seem to have adapted themselves to the situation and they have such a direct line now to billionaires they’ve developed over time to sustain themselves and their activities. And they’re surprisingly embedded in the Trump administration now.

Gareth Gore: Yeah. I think the loss of the bank was a major blow to Opus Dei because with the bank they had this kind of guaranteed flow of money every single year. In some years dividends from the shares that these foundations owned in the bank would generate almost a hundred million dollars of income without doing anything, you know, just from the shares that they owned in the bank. And so that was, you know, that was guaranteed money. And so to lose that is a major blow. Now, what they’ve done in the years since then, I mean, they were already doing this even whilst the bank was still alive but particularly in the years since, is begin to cosy up to a number of very wealthy American catholic billionaires, and that’s provided a kind of new source of income for them. And a lot of these billionaires are very well connected within the Republican political spheres. And so that then connects Opus Dei into that world too.

The bank collapsed in 2017. It was about six months after the first Trump election win. And so things in, in Washington were already beginning to change and Opus Dei was already part of this kind of wider MAGA movement before it was even MAGA.

Opus Dei is a Catholic organisation that purportedly just wants to help ordinary Catholics to go deeper into their faith, that’s the kind of marketing spiel, but really what this organisation is, is it’s a political organisation that wants to reshape society according to its very conservative reading of the Bible and it’s very reactionary politics. And in my book, I expose how this has been what they’ve been doing right from the beginning. I even got my hands on some of the kind of secret writings of the founder, which confirm this, that it had a political agenda all along.

Fast forward to today, it’s still doing the very same thing. It’s presenting itself as one thing as like just a religious organisation that wants to help Catholics to be more serious and to give themselves up to God. But meanwhile it’s embedded in all of these NGOs and political movements and, over the years, it’s really pushed a huge amount to infiltrate that world in Washington. It’s really starting to reap the fruits of what it sewed many years ago, in more recent years, and, and a number of its members were pretty prominent, certainly in the first Trump administration, there were about four or five Opus Dei members or, or Opus Dei sympathisers let’s say, because membership is, is, is a secret thing. It’s not widely publicised or revealed. But the groundwork to this began many years ago, you know, since the seventies, eighties, and throughout the nineties, Opus Dei was pumping resources into Washington DC especially, trying to kind of build its network there, trying to infiltrate the Catholic Republican circles.

And it did that very successfully. I mean, you look at some of the most influential people today in the United States, and many of them are connected to Opus Dei. You know, you’ve got people like Leonard Leo who’s the former vice-president of the Federalist Society, you could argue who has single-handedly shifted the balance on the US Supreme Court to make it a very, you know, he’s the guy that, you know, we can pin the overturning of Roe v. Wade on this guy and his efforts over the past 20, 30 years. He’s, he’s close friends with the main Opus Dei priest in Washington DC. He’s a donor to various Opus Dei operations throughout the United States and around the world. He sends his kids to the Opus Dei School in Washington. He gets spiritual direction from Opus Dei. He sits on the board of directors at the Opus Dei centre in Central Washington. So, you know, this guy, hugely influential figure on the conservative, conservative legal movement. He’s very closely aligned to Opus Dei as is Kevin Roberts, who’s the president of the Heritage Foundation, the guy that is responsible for, you know, kind of the brains behind Project 2025, which informs much of Trump’s agenda. He also is a frequent visitor to, to the Opus Dei centre in Washington DC, I mean, this, this kind of sounds a bit like a bit of conspiracy theory, theory, but it’s, it’s, it’s, trust me, it’s very real! And that’s just Washington, right? I mean, Opus Dei does this wherever it operates around the world. And it, it has a presence in, I think, almost 70 countries. It’s present in almost every major city around the world. And, um, it’s doing the very same, it’s, it’s seeking to extend and recruit from the political elite, the business elite, the academic elite, people like journalists and authors and the rest of it, it wants anyone that can be in any way influential, anyone that can help it to really reshape society is, is a target.

I’m not religious myself, but I do know from going to a Church of England school that the teachings of Christ are, you know, love thy neighbour and many of the policies that these people are pushing are deeply kind of anti-Christian, at least in my understanding of what Christianity is. But I think, where Opus Dei fills that void is by providing a lot of these men, and they’re generally men, although not exclusively men, but by providing them with a kind of a spiritual justification for what they’re doing. So, you know, these guys are going out there, taking other people’s rights away, making inequality much worse and literally treading on the, on the poor. And, you know, they’ve got these Opus Dei priests kind of patting them on the back saying, you’re doing a great job, this is, what God wants and they’re working towards this great religious goal.

Naomi Fowler: Yes, yes. And this court case brought by the women in Argentina claiming that Opus Dei enslaved them, trafficked them, and denied them access to medical care, that’s pending now. Can you tell us about that?

Gareth Gore: Yes. They announced the charges last September. These legal cases can take years but there’s been some movement in recent weeks. Public prosecutors have asked to question the deputy head of Opus Dei globally, and there are also moves to try to force his boss, the head of Opus Dei to testify in the case, so we’ll see. This really goes right to the top, and so this is gonna be very embarrassing not just for Opus Dei, but for the wider Church. And I should say as well, I know from investigating the bank, these schools that were set up in Argentina, it wasn’t just a one-off. There were similar schools, there were dozens of schools set up all around the world. This is a much bigger scandal. And we’ve seen similar women coming forward in, in Ireland, people who’d, who’d gone to a similar school in, in the Irish countryside. There were dozens of other schools all around the world. This is I believe the tip of the iceberg, and I think we’re gonna see far more women coming forward.

Naomi Fowler: Opus Dei denies the accusation of human trafficking, and of course, it will have the chance to defend itself. The case could be all the more challenging precisely because of the way Opus Dei has tended to use networks of foundations and companies which potentially removes it from legal jeopardy, we’ll have Gareth Gore back on to talk about the case when it comes to court.

I’ve put a link in the show notes to his fascinating book, Opus, the Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy inside the Catholic Church. There’s also some further reading. That’s it for this month. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back with you next month. Bye for now.