In recent years, a series of leaks has revealed the extent to which the financial system continues to be abused by the rich. The Panama Papers helped expose the role played by “secrecy jurisdictions”, shell companies and “professional enablers” such as lawyers and accountants. Investigations into laundromat schemes for money laundering have shone a light on the role of corruption in the judiciary. And through scandals such as the one engulfing the Danish bank Danske Bank in Estonia, we have learned about longstanding failings in the compliance procedures of the banking sector.

Despite all this, it is sometimes difficult to see the true impact of the wholesale theft of national wealth. That’s what’s significant about the latest dump of documents, called the Luanda Leaks because of their connection with Angola. They reveal not only how Isabel dos Santos, daughter of José Eduardo dos Santos, the former president of Angola, was able to amass a fortune of more than $2bn; they also reveal the misery inflicted by the theft of national wealth.

While the winners enjoy the luxuries of living in London, partying in Mediterranean resorts and winter sun aboard multimillion-dollar yachts, the losers’ lives are blighted by sewage, eviction and disease.

The Luanda Leaks expose, once again, the failure of international institutions, systems and standards to combat such egregious activity. They suggest that, for the people who facilitate and engineer the movement of money around the world, sitting thousands of miles away in their glass-walled skyscrapers or tropical paradises, one eight-figure sum is much like the next. The consequences of their actions are out of sight and thus out of mind.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Danske Bank’s branch in Tallinn, Estonia, has been hit by scandal. Photograph: Ints Kalniņš/Reuters

The financial sector has paid a price for recent scandals: banks have been fined billions of dollars for compliance failures ranging from facilitating the evasion of financial sanctions to laundering the profits of drug cartels. Billions more dollars, in turn, have been spent in financial centres around the world building compliance departments and developing systems to monitor the financial activity of banks’ clients and identify activity that might suggest something is not right. Lessons have been learned, but that learning has been selective, confined more often than not to the banking sector alone.

All the while, as banks build their defences, an equally committed army of accountants, lawyers, consultants and advisers works to subvert those defences. They use every tool of financial engineering to hide ownership and obfuscate payments, ensuring that deniability is plausible and that the trail followed by any investigator will be fiendishly complex.

There remain other obstacles to overcome: shortcomings in national and international regulations, governments’ woeful underinvestment in their response to illicit finance, and a lack of transparency concerning company ownership. This means that, until there is a revolution in how we tackle illicit finance, the sharp minds that enable the theft of national wealth will remain one step ahead.

Heads could roll at PwC over Isabel dos Santos links, says chairman Read more

For 30 years, thanks primarily to the efforts of the Financial Action Task Force – the standard-setter tasked with driving forward the global response to this problem – the international community has been able to say that “something is being done” and that “standards are being raised”. Yet to those suffering in kleptocracies, it doesn’t feel as though anything is being done; and to those who enable that suffering, these standards represent no impediment.

As we enter a new decade, it is time to recognise that, as long as the professional enablers continue to allow those with privilege to buy impunity, flaunt their wealth and build the sort of empire owned by Isabel dos Santos, the current approach to securing the integrity of the financial system is failing – a failure that will blight the lives of millions more people.

To tackle this properly, two things must be done. Governments need to take a less insipid approach to addressing the financial system’s compliance weaknesses and lack of transparency, as well as devoting more resources to investigations and prosecutions. And the people who enable this illicit activity and the misery it inflicts must be held personally to account.

•Tom Keatinge is director of the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute