Spotlight on Corruption’s submission to Legal Services Board’s consultation on the new regulatory objective on economic crime, 7 February 2025.
This submission sets out why the second phase of the Comprehensive Spending Review 2025 is a major opportunity to enhance the UK’s ability to fight economic crime and promote economic growth for law abiding business.
This submission answers a number of specific questions presented in HM Treasury’s consultation on the Money Laundering Regulations which ran from 11 March 2024 to 9 June 2024.
Over the past year we have monitored the enforcement of sanctions breaches and challenges to sanctions designations in the UK courts, based on our court monitoring programme and enforcement
expertise.
As regular observers of court proceedings, our experience is that the public access rights which flow from the principle of open justice are not always a practical reality. The most frequent and frustrating challenge we encounter in this regard relates to our requests for non-party access to court documents.
We submitted evidence to the Arbitration Bill [HL] Special Bill Committee on 6 February 2024. This further evidence is submitted on invitation from the Chair to address three additional questions as answered below.
Threats to the UK’s democracy in the context of election finance, including foreign money, dirty money and the risk of undue influence by high-level donors.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 the UK has taken long-needed steps to counter economic crimes including corruption and kleptocracy. This includes two Economic Crime Acts and a new Economic Crime Plan. While we welcome this important progress, the UK remains vulnerable in several critical areas.
