Offshore Predation: Illicit Financial Flows and Beneficial Ownership Opacity in Resource-Rich African States

This article develops offshore predation as an analytical lens for understanding illicit financial flows, offshore secrecy, and governance failure in resource-rich states. Rather than treating illicit financial flows, beneficial ownership opacity, and governance failure in resource-rich african states as a descriptive case, the manuscript argues that resource predation in fragile African states is sustained not only by domestic corruption but by a transnational infrastructure of shell firms, nominee ownership, correspondent banking, and permissive legal jurisdictions that makes elite extraction portable and difficult to trace. Anchored in Political economy of corruption (Rose-Ackerman; Wedeman); global financial governance (Palan; Shaxson ); developmental state theory critically. Develops a systematic account of the mechanisms through which oil revenues are siphoned from resource-rich African states through opacity in corporate ownership structures. the paper translates the topic brief into three linked questions: What are the specific legal-financial mechanisms mispriced transfer pricing, shell company networks, offshore trust structures, and correspondent banking relationships through which South Sudanese and Angolan oil revenues are transferred to elite private accounts? How do international financial centres London, Dubai, Delaware, Luxembourg provide the infrastructure enabling illicit financial flows from conflict-affected African states, and what is their moral and legal responsibility? What is the developmental cost of IFFs from sub-Saharan Africa in terms of foregone public investment, and how do these flows interact with aid dependence to produce a perverse political economy? Methodologically, it is organised around Financial investigative analysis combining G