Money Laundering

What’s the issue?

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”.

What does Spotlight on Corruption do?

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:

• whether corrupt assets coming into the UK are being frozen and confiscated using civil forfeiture under the Proceeds of Crime Act;
• how tools such as Unexplained Wealth Orders and Account Freezing Orders are impacting on the ability of the UK to detect and freeze corrupt wealth; and
• whether the UK is effectively deterring individuals and institutions in the UK from being involved in high-end money laundering through enforcement of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and Money Laundering Regulations 2017.