09/04/2024
ECONOMIC CRIME AND CORPORATE TRANSPARENCY ACT, 2023
The UK has one of the world’s largest and most open economies, making it an attractive place for global business. However, this same openness exposes the UK to the risk of bad actors taking advantage, including to perpetrate fraud and money laundering, which, in turn, funds serious and organised crime here in the UK, and facilitates corruption overseas. The threat of undermines legitimate business and impacts on everyday society and all citizens’ lives.
The Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act (the “ Act”).
• Allowed the Government to move faster and harder when imposing sanctions.
• Created a Register of Overseas Entities to help crack down on foreign criminals using UK property to launder money.
• Reformed and strengthened the UK’s Unexplained Wealth Order regime to better support law enforcement investigations.
The Government has now brought forward further legislation to deliver a suite of wider-ranging reforms to tackle economic crime and improve transparency over corporate entities. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 will deliver:
1) Reforms to .
2) Reforms to prevent the abuse of limited partnerships.
3) Additional powers to seize and recover suspected criminal cryptoassets.
4) Reforms to give businesses more confidence to share information in order to tackle money laundering and other economic crime.
5) New intelligence gathering powers for law enforcement and removal of nugatory burdens on business.
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The will provide additional powers to law enforcement so they are able to more quickly and easily seize and recover cryptoassets which are the proceeds of crime or associated with illicit activity such as money laundering, fraud and attacks.
The Act will: • Principally amend both criminal confiscation powers in Parts 2, 3 and 4 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 ( ) and civil recovery powers in Part 5 of POCA to enable enforcement agencies to more effectively tackle criminal use of cryptoassets.
🔖 Legislation:
The Act will strengthen anti-money laundering powers, enabling better information sharing on suspected money laundering, fraud and other economic crimes.
The reforms will:
• Enable businesses in certain situations to share information more easily for the purposes of preventing, investigating or detecting economic crime by disapplying civil liability for breaches of confidentiality for firms who share information to combat economic crime.
• Enable proactive intelligence gathering by law enforcement and strengthening the National Crime Agency’s Unit’s ( ) ability to obtain information from businesses relating to money laundering and by removing the requirement for a pre-existing Report (SAR) to have been submitted before an Information Order (IO) can be made.
• Focus private sector and law enforcement resources on high value activity, reducing the reporting burden on businesses and enabling greater prioritisation of law enforcement resource by expanding the types of case in which businesses can deal with clients’ property without having to first submit a Defence Against Money Laundering ( ) SAR.
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