Britain’s £100bn-a-year money-laundering problem: out of 14,000 tip-offs, police acted forcefully on seven
‘Britain is failing to prosecute corrupt officials and criminals laundering their money through front companies, banks and luxury houses here, because the police lack the resources and the legal processes are woefully inadequate.
That is the conclusion of a report from the biggest anti-corruption NGO, Transparency International, into why so few money-laundering investigations and asset seizures happen in the UK despite Britain’s status as one of the biggest centres in the world for the cleaning of ill-gotten gains.
TI revealed for the first time that, while banks, stockbrokers and other companies supply law enforcement agencies with 14,000 tip-offs each year about their customers, last year the police acted forcefully on only seven of these “suspicious activity reports”. Nick Maxwell, head of research at TI, said: “The law enforcement approach in the UK is simply not fit for purpose.”’
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