Loan-back
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A money laundering or tax avoidance scheme in which money is deposited in an offshore bank and then borrowed back by a shell company controlled by the holder of that bank account.
"It was Lansky who pioneered the “loan-back” technique. Money was moved in the form of cash, traveller's cheques, or bearer bonds for deposit in numbered Swiss accounts. The money then returned home in the form of "loans" to the person who had initiated the cycle, who would replay the loan with interest, deducting the interest from his taxable income as a business expense. Multinational corporations continue to use a variant of this scheme to reduce their tax obligations."
Example
More examples"It was Lansky who pioneered the “loan-back” technique. Money was moved in the form of cash, traveller's cheques, or bearer bonds for deposit in numbered Swiss accounts. The money then returned home in the form of "loans" to the person who had initiated the cycle, who would replay the loan with interest, deducting the interest from his taxable income as a business expense. Multinational corporations continue to use a variant of this scheme to reduce their tax obligations."
Etymology
From loan + back.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.