Our growing Criminology list takes a critical stance and features boundary-pushing work with innovative, research-led publications.
A particular focus of the list are books that engage with our global social challenges, both on a local and international level. We aim to publish books in a wide range of formats that will have real impact and shape public discourse.
Criminology
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This chapter underscores the reasons why we know so little about money laundering. After several decades of ‘doing something’ to stop money laundering, what we have chosen to read, listen to and ultimately believe is no longer true about the problem. The commonly publicised three-stage process of money laundering is looked at before concluding that it is neither helpful nor is it now true. The chapter also questions the relevance of experts in the AML field. Are they really experts in money laundering or simply storytellers and compliance tick-box managers made to confuse the confused?
Intelligence sharing has become the new tool in detecting money laundering. Nevertheless, global companies which have the same name, same purpose, same client base find it difficult to share information within themselves inside the same four walls. And what does sharing result in? A loss of control. It is suggested that the sharing of information and, to a greater extent, intelligence is nothing more than a misdemeanour when it comes to FIUs and corporate entities. A misdemeanour jumped on by the organisers as means to gain publicity because, in the end, partnerships are a practice of ‘smoke and mirrors’, within an already inefficient global AML regime.
Money laundering is an ancient activity dating from the very first theft by Eve. The need for a new definition in global criminal codes was caused by computerisation and the mass consumption of illegal drugs.
The authors show that the good intentions of legal drafters at the United Nations were wrecked by national law makers who separated money laundering from its predicate crimes. This artificial divide makes the global AML regime unworkable, and this enables widespread criminality across the world.
The authors explain the key roles of financial investigators, circumstantial evidence, and the origins of effective legislation, notably the Proceeds of Crime Acts of Ireland and the United Kingdom. The sad history of tackling crime is that successful confiscation regimes have followed from shocking assassinations and the authors hope that this book may pre-empt such undesirable drivers of good policy.
We start with the glamorisation by the media which conflates criminal wealth with cleverness. This leaks into public policy with the attribution of sophistication to money laundering used by governments to explain law enforcement failure before they have even engaged with the enemy.
The public and the AML regime are distracted by new developments such as cryptocurrency and the Dark Web, which leads us away from addressing obvious weaknesses with developing simple and inexpensive solutions.
The authors focus on four development areas: to investigate cash, solve cross-border cooperation, abolish the double indemnity enjoyed by companies, and address the chronic weakness of law enforcement. Perhaps above all we need some meaningful statistics to judge the AML regime and assess whether it works.
In this chapter, the idea that money laundering is a threat to national security is discussed and the lack of obvious reasons why is highlighted. The authors question whether attributing money laundering to national security gives less requirement to evidence it as a problem or prove it is being managed beyond public-facing generic assessments. Has the current association between money laundering and national security perhaps provided the ideal alibi for the failures over the last 30 years? Even if money laundering is a threat to national security, it is unlikely to be a national security threat of every country.
This chapter explains how money laundering is a buffet, not table d’hôte. A money launderer chooses what will work for them and their activities, rather than following a neatly defined money laundering typology. It is these same typologies which are being repeated that are leading to a distortion of understanding confined by shallow analysis and blue-sky thinking. Building upon the three-stage process of money laundering, the chapter explores the problems caused by ‘red flags’ for identifying and preventing money laundering. The chapter concludes by suggesting money laundering is a series of transfers and purchases that need to be identified if money laundering is to be understood.
The authors challenge the importance of prosecuting money laundering and show that it is a useful spur to financial investigation and a precursor to asset recovery but is not an end in itself. The specialised status of money laundering prosecution encouraged by the FATF is an impediment to its widespread use by conservative criminal justice professionals. This inhibits the financial investigation and confiscation of criminal assets, thereby allowing crime to pay and encouraging criminality across the world.
The difficulty of prosecuting companies and other ‘legal people’ is emphasised in the context of the widespread use of companies to commit common predicate crimes. The enablers of corporate criminality are condemned – including Company Formation Agents, lawyers and accountants – but special blame is attributed to governments which allow the mass creation of criminal companies, registered in publicly owned registries.
The idea of being sorry for a failure in AML compliance has become meaningless. The corporate memory defaults to bygone activities too quickly despite the apology statements and punishments. By punishments we mean the significant financial costs to the business for which customers are typically responsible for paying. As we discuss in this chapter, without a clicking of handcuffs in the boardroom, the punishments being handed out will only add to the costs for the customer. Alongside this we discuss how the fines are neither working nor do they correspond to evidence to suggest a fairness across the landscape of failures. As fines continue to increase, will there ever come a point that a fine will cause a business to close its doors?
The authors explain the SAR regime and debunk two common fallacies: there is no such thing as a ‘low intelligence value’ SAR at an FIU and finding a ‘good’ SAR is not akin to finding a needle in a haystack.
These myths arise from mixed messaging caused by the existence of three different types of dirty money flow and only one regime. There is a failure to understand the role of SAR end-users in law enforcement and a break in the computerisation between banks which make SARs and the investigation agencies that receive them. The failing SAR regime exposes the vast resources of the financial sector and FIUs compared to the pitiful resources available to law enforcement.
Crime pays unless confiscation happens. The authors show that 80% of countries are ineffective at confiscating the proceeds of crime, thereby enabling a global crime wave within and across national boundaries. The attitudes of different parts of society towards confiscation is explored to show that the public and politicians support confiscation, but police, prosecutors and the courts do not.
In the absence of clear support for the idea of recovering money from convicted criminals, the authors feel the need to present the case for confiscation. They explain the efficacy of different types of asset recovery and the need for comparative laws, statistics and practice. The shocking example of the NAO report on UK confiscation is cited to show how a global approach is preferable to a national approach.
