India, Aug. 31 -- Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant has flagged the staggering scale of money laundering and white-collar crime, saying the world launders enough money in a year to buy every one of its eight billion people a modest laptop and still have money left over, while less than one per cent of the illicit wealth is ever recovered.

Addressing the closing session of the 43rd International Symposium on Economic Crime at Cambridge on Saturday, Kant used the striking comparison to underline the gap between the scale of economic crime and the ability of legal systems to recover the proceeds.

"If the global estimates on money laundering are even roughly right, the world launders enough money in a single year to buy every one of t...