The UK, as a major financial centre, and its Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, have long been attractive destinations for laundering dirty money. While there is no official figure for how much money is laundered through the UK, the National Crime Agency found that there was a “realistic possibility that the scale of money laundering impacting the UK is in the hundreds of billions of pounds annually”.
We track whether the UK’s laws designed to deter the laundering of corrupt money and confiscate the proceeds of corruption are working. We focus on:
Our analysis traces the origins of this investigation and the twists and turns of a dramatic jury trial that culminated in the acquittal of a woman who wielded unprecedented power over Nigeria’s notoriously dysfunctional oil industry.
A major new McMafia order case was revealed yesterday, as a Dubai-based UK investment firm called Enspire Investments LLC approached the High Court claiming to be the victim of a complex fraud by the targets of an Unexplained Wealth Order (UWO) who allegedly siphoned off their €45 million investment.
As the government lays out its plans for a major expansion of the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA) anti-money laundering (AML) supervision responsibilities, we look at how these proposals can be strengthened.
Companies House’s long overdue crackdown on individuals that have failed to verify their identities has begun, with a flurry of warning letters (equivalent to almost one-fifth of all companies registered), but strong enforcement must follow to remove the UK’s corporate registry from kleptocrats’ and fraudsters’ toolkits.
New data on key corruption and economic crime offences in Spotlight’s enforcement tracker has revealed big increases in prosecutions across the board in 2024-25. But looking beyond the headline numbers, what story does this data really tell us about the state of anti-corruption enforcement in England and Wales?
Asset recovery – the process of tracing, freezing, seizing, managing, preserving, disposing, and returning the proceeds of crime and corruption or compensating victims of crime – lies at the heart...
The UK Home Office is seeking to address problems relating to information sharing between and within the public and private sectors to stop financial crime. Through a call for evidence that closed in May 2026, Spotlight on Corruption submitted evidence drawn from our research and unique court monitoring programme on how information could be shared more effectively to tackle economic crime.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Illicit Finance Summit delay should be used to launch bold UK leadership against dirty money The delay to the UK’s Illicit Finance Summit should now be used...
