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As Nick Leeson begins his six‐and‐a‐half‐year sentence in Singapore the question must be asked — is this really the end of the road or is there greater fallout to come? The two most crucial things to emerge from months of press coverage interviews and negotiation are (1) the status given to the criminal and (2) the impact on plea bargaining; of the two perhaps the first matter is the more interesting, but the implications must be considered.

The Criminal Justice Act 1987 (CJA 1987) hailed a new era. Obligations were imposed on prosecution and defence to collaborate at an early stage to identify issues, serve documents, prepare schedules and deal with points of law. The preparatory hearing was introduced. The intention was better case management, to smooth the path towards the presentation of trial and make the system generally more efficient. As an idea it was a good one, but the operation was at variance with what Parliament intended. The Act made provision that the party which lost on a particular point at a preparatory hearing could take that point on appeal. This caused a rush of applications to the Court of Appeal with counsel doubtless feeling that they had to take the point so as not to be disadvantaged later. In a number of decisions the Court ruled that the legal arguments did not form part of the preparatory hearing. Arguably the Court of Appeal was looking for clarification but the reality is that there have been a number of inconsistent decisions that have defeated Parliament's intention for smoother case management. If the Court of Appeal was looking for an administrative way of lowering the number of appeals they had to force the ball back into the court of the Executive. Let us examine whether the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Bill has assisted the position or not.

Gone are the days when a bank could concentrate on providing a reliable service to its customer, and maintain that as part of that service it could guard the confidentiality of all information learnt in the course of the customer's banking. Formerly, a customer could be relatively confident that information about his or her business affairs would not be disclosed save in fairly limited circumstances, and the bank would not trouble itself as to how these affairs were conducted. Current legislation and regulation requires a bank to be aware of the commercial background to its clients' dealings and, in certain circumstances, to take steps to report criminal conduct or to account to third parties.

Enforcement of regulatory controls has traditionally been left to the criminal law. In the last 15 years there has been an increasing interest in using civil remedies for this purpose. Most of the attention has been on financial services, but there have been recent developments in the UK planning system, which provide interesting parallels.

Section 2 of the Criminal Justice Act 1987 abrogates the right to silence since a suspect is required to answer questions in pre‐trial investigations by the SFO, although the answers are inadmissible as evidence unless proceedings are brought under s. 2(14) for giving false information or by s. 2(8), where the individual ‘makes a statement inconsistent with it’. In a previous article, the writer has considered the necessity and effectiveness of s. 2 powers. It is also instructive to analyse the conceptual basis of s. 2 powers since this will aid in the interpretation of statutory ambiguities and will allow the courts to have a uniformity of approach when seeking to resolve the statutory ambiguities. The conceptual basis is also important as concerns the resolution of where the line lies between the effective investigation of offences pursuant to s. 2 and the rights of the individual subject to such questioning. A critical examination of the above issues demands steering a careful course between normative rules and theory: in this area above all others it is impossible and undesirable to divorce one from the other.

Information is power — so it has been said — and nowhere has this statement been realised more significantly than in the banking industry. IT and banking in the 1990s and going forward to the next millennium are tightly bonded. It is now more difficult to determine whether business drives technology or the other way round. Given this scenario, one of the most important facets of managing IT in a bank is that of information security.

In most jurisdictions a suspect has the right to remain silent during criminal proceedings and he cannot be penalised for making false statements. This is loosely known as the ‘ban on self incrimination’ and is regarded as an important factor in due process protection of individuals subject to criminal proceedings. The right to silence applies only to the stage of criminal proceedings, and up to date it has surprisingly not been seriously debated. A criminal may have caused individuals and society major loss, damage or suffering; in principle one would expect that he would be obliged to assist in the clearing‐up of the case, particularly if this could ameliorate or repair the negative consequences of the crime. But this is not the way it is looked at. The suspect is under pressure, and must not be faced with the choice of lying or confessing.

The short answer is no. Notable examples of anti‐corruption laws are available. But there is probably no single example that one would elevate to a definitive universal model. This short briefing will focus first on the multilateral efforts of the Organization of the American States (OAS) against corruption and secondly, on the new anti money‐laundering legislation of the Bahamas with references to other major countries, as another perspective apart from the perspectives of other regions.