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As financial crime continues unabated as a growth industry, the frustration of the victims of those crimes seems to be growing exponentially. In the past the major concerns were focused on how to deal with massive multi‐jurisdictional frauds, extradition, and the lack of international cooperation. With time, many of those concerns have, to a great extent, been alleviated.

A unifying theme apparent at this year's Symposium was the need for balance when lifting the veil of bank secrecy: (1) the need to protect civil liberties versus the need to fight crime; (2) the bank's need to balance its role as policeman while furthering its commercial objectives; (3) the necessity of weighing international cooperation against the awareness that individual nations jealously guard their own legislative regime; (4) the dichotomy of technology that serves both to protect and penetrate secrecy; (5) the balance required when investigating crimes.

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.

Until recently, the involvement of syndicated and organized criminals in economic crime, and the idea of its exitence outside (and to some extent even within) the United States has been discounted if not scoffed at. Describes the characteristics of organized crime and, specifically, economic organized crime, and its facilitators. Relates some “horror stories” to illustrate the seriousness of the problem. Examines the difficulties involved in combating organized economic crime and some of the efforts to counter it being made at international level.

There was a time in the tide of men, when ‘offshore’ jurisdictions were known as ‘tax havens’, when ‘money laundering’ was an unknown phrase, when ‘insider dealing’ was sport, when ‘bank secrecy’ was applied only to Switzerland, and when far flung islands offered only sun, sand and an exotic holiday experience.