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A limited liability company (LLC) plays an important role in the commercial activities in Kuwait. The majority of companies in Kuwait takes the form of a limited liability. This is due to a number of reasons, namely smallness of the invested capital, its suitability to a middle‐size enterprise and the limited liability of the partners. The LLC was confined to at least two special provisions (prohibition) that differ from other forms of companies. First, Article 187 of the Company Code provides that LLCs ‘may not transact insurance business, banking or the investment of monies for third parties’, and secondly, Article 185(2) states that ‘partners may only be natural persons’. The rationale of these prohibitions is based on the weakness of the financial position and the limited liability of the company, as insurance and investment need a large capital, and on the other hand to prevent holding companies (HCs) from controlling LLCs, and enter into irrational speculation in commercial activities, which may affect the minority of shareholders and the national economy too.

Money laundering is not considered a novelty on the international or local arena, nor has it become known only recently. What is new in this matter is the criminalisation of money laundering operations.

In recent times, there has been some disquiet within certain sectors of the Singapore business community over the role of auditors in detecting corporate fraud. The cause of this concern can perhaps be attributed partly to the Barings collapse in February 1995 and the subsequent suggestions that the auditors of the Barings subsidiary in Singapore, Barings Futures Singapore Pte Ltd (BFS), may have been negligent in their audit work. More recently, in mid‐1996, a substantial locally listed company, Amcol Holdings Ltd (Amcol), was placed under judicial management amid rumours alleging possible misdeeds by senior executives and directors. The Amcol saga has, once again, focused some attention on the role of auditors and their duty to detect fraud in company accounts.