Claude Bebeaur says he would be prepared to resign

"If the people who had confidence in me to lead this candidacy had asked me, I would have resigned immediately," Claude Bebear, formerly chairman of insurance company Axa said.

Just hours after his comments, the task force published a blacklist of countries that have failed to clamp down on money laundering and threatened the most persistent offenders with sanctions.

The Financial Action Task Force on money laundering, which is linked the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), pointed out that dirty money can arise from white-collar crimes such as embezzlement, insider trading, bribery and computer fraud.

And it can be created from illegal arms sales, smuggling and organised crime such as drug trafficking and prostitution rings, the task force said.

Armed raid

Efforts to combat money laundering are being stepped up across the world, and not only by the financial action men in Paris.

Armed raids against organised criminals are common in many countries

Their colleagues across the Atlantic have adopted more radical methods.

On Thursday, tourists and businessmen looked on as heavily armed and hooded US federal agents raided currency exchange offices in the middle of the tourist district in Mexico City.

The operation, one of several similar ones in Mexico recently, was targeting the money laundering operations set up by the Juarez drug cartel.

White collar crimes

At the other end of the scale, regulators are targeting the men and women in suits in the world's financial centres.

White collar criminals are targeted in the world's financial centres

In March this year, the Financial Services Authority found that 15 UK banks were guilty of "significant control weaknesses" in their money laundering checking systems.

This followed the discovery of $1.3bn in UK accounts, allegedly from illegal transactions by Nigeria's former president, General Sani Abacha.

A month earlier, in the US, Congress criticised some of the largest banks in the country for their lax policies on money laundering.

Cyberspace and euro notes

It is getting tougher to crack down on money laundering, OECD director William Witherell said.

The current boom in e-finance is also boosting money laundering, bribery and tax evasion as technical advances facilitate "financial crime and other abuses that respect no national boundaries", he said.

And while hi-tech criminals hoard cash in cyberspace, the launch of euro notes and coins is about to make life easier for the continent's criminals too.

This will create an "unpredictable appetite of organised crime for new, high denomination banknotes", according to UBS Warburg's European policy analyst Alison Cottrell.

"What used to fit in a suitcase if you used dollars, you could probably fit in a wallet if you used euros," she said, noting that the new 500 euros bill will be worth almost five times as much as the top dollar note; the $100 bill.

But the launch of the euro also creates problems for people and organisations holding large, illegal holdings of German marks, French francs or Italian lira.

"No one is going to burn their money. All suspect money, black, grey or from different colours, will come in. This is a good opportunity to attack various sorts of crime," said Willy Bruggeman, the deputy director of Europe's central crime fighting organisation Europol.

Dynamic process

But despite such valiant efforts, the Financial Action Task Force realises that targeting the criminals will never eradicate the problem.

Embezzlement, insider trading, bribery and computer fraud schemes can produce large profits and create the incentive to 'legitimise' the ill-gotten gains through money laundering

Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering

Coordinating international efforts to identify nations with lax controls and pressuring them to get tougher on money launderers will help.

"Combating money laundering is a dynamic process because the criminals who launder money are continuously seeking new ways to achieve their illegal ends," the task force said.