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The passing into law last October of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 reinforced the position that economic crime is a key battleground for UK government and law enforcement. The Act followed on from the earlier Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act 2022 which was rushed through Parliament in response to Russia’s attack…

On the 21 February 2024, in a hearing widely reported in the legal press, the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal ordered that solicitor Matthew Nester should be struck off the roll for recording administrative (non-billable) time against client files when no such work had been carried out. The matter had been reported to the SRA by his…

Recent media reports have revealed that Entain, the UK corporate which owns well-known betting chains Ladbrokes and Corals, will pay £585 million as part of an agreement with HM Revenue & Customs to settle criminal allegations of bribery in relation to a Turkish betting subsidiary. The penalty comes as part of a Deferred Prosecution Agreement…

The illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted a swift and powerful response from governments around the world. Without wishing to engage in direct military conflict with Russia, many opted to attempt to impact the funding of the military operation via a varied and frequently co-ordinated set of sanctions. Although a range of sanctions…

Last Thursday (15 June) the government announced that new provisions are to be added to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, already at the Report Stage in the House of Lords, to extend the “identification doctrine” to senior managers of “legal persons” (such as corporations and partnerships) in respect of economic offences. Established in…

You would think that with all the legal and regulatory focus on money laundering, it would be comparatively simple to define. Not so. Even within the AML sector, many people struggle to articulate a clear definition of money laundering, and those who can offer a succinct definition are rarely completely in agreement with one another.…

One could reasonably argue that 21st century cultural history is reflected as much by financial crime legislation as it is by pop music or cinema. In much the same way as John Lennon supplied the soundtrack to the end of the Vietnam war, with a million people marching on Washington singing “Give Peace A Chance”,…

On the 4 August the National Crime Agency announced that they had arrested a 33-year-old Chinese national in Teesside “…as part of a National Crime Agency investigation into a suspected Chinese underground banking network”. They went on to say that the investigation relates to “…the alleged laundering of criminal cash through so-called Daigou shopping, where…

Juvenal, a Roman poet writing around the beginning of the 2nd Century AD, stated in one of his Satires that “a perfect wife is a rare bird in the land, and rather like a black swan”. Those of us tempted to credit Juvenal with egalitarian views of women, or at least with a genuine devotion to…

On the 24 February 2022, Russian troops moved into the Donbas region of Ukraine in what President Vladimir Putin described as a “special military operation” and most Western countries described as a full-scale invasion. In the wake of this military incursion, many countries including the UK hurriedly implemented a wide range of sanctions against Russian…