Loretta Napoleoni

Loretta Napoleoni (born 1955) is an Italian journalist and political analyst. She reports on the financing of terrorism and connected topics, both finance- and security-related.

Life and career

Napoleoni was born and raised in Rome, Italy. In the mid 1970s, she became an active feminist and marxist. She was a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. and a Rotary Scholar at the London School of Economics (LSE). She has a M.Phil. in Terrorism Studies from the University of East London, and a Master's in International Relations from SAIS.

As an economist Napoleoni has worked for several banks and international organizations in Europe and the United States. In the early 1980s she worked at the National Bank of Hungary on the convertibility of the Hungarian forint that became the blueprint for the convertibility of the ruble a decade later.

As well as lecturing regularly on the financing of terrorism at Cambridge Judge Business School, Napoleoni advises several governments on counter-terrorism. As chairman of the counter terrorism financing group for the Club de Madrid, she brought heads of state from around the world together to create a new strategy for combatting the financing of terror networks.