Search results

The criminal money laundering statutes grew out of the experience drug investigators had in tracking the proceeds of illegal drug transactions. Frequently, the cash was disguised as legitimate proceeds or hidden in a way that concealed the true owner and was then moved into the legitimate stream of commerce or returned to the country where the drugs originated to keep the scheme going. This led to training investigators to believe that money laundering always occurred in three stages: placement, layering and integration. That model, however, has little application to most money laundering scenarios, including those that involve funds already in electronic form when the laundering process begins. This paper aims to take a broader look at money laundering and suggests an accordingly broader approach to identifying money laundering transactions.

A review of the origins of the current paradigm.

The current paradigm is obsolete.

A broader approach to training is needed.

Civil forfeiture is an increasingly common way for governments to relieve criminal wrongdoers of the proceeds of their crimes and to restore the property to the victims of the offense. The question that is asked, however, is this: Is civil forfeiture an essential tool that is needed to fill a gap in the arsenal of weapons available to law enforcement or is it a prosecutorial shortcut that allows cases to be closed without obtaining the evidence needed to obtain a criminal conviction in cases that should be prosecuted criminally. The answer is that it is both. When properly used, civil forfeiture is an essential tool that provides a means of recovering property, but it is a tool that can also be used to save time and money even though the investment of those resources in bringing a criminal to justice would better serve the public interest. The aim of this paper is to show why this is so.

Analysis of the use of civil forfeiture in the USA.

Civil forfeiture is an essential law enforcement tool.

While undeniably an essential law enforcement tool, civil forfeiture is sometimes used as a shortcut to conserve resources.

The globalization of crime has made it possible for international money launderers, kleptocrats and fraudsters to commit crimes in one jurisdiction while remaining safe in another and hiding their assets in a third. At the same time, law enforcement officials remain constrained by the rules of national sovereignty that inhibit their ability to recover assets located beyond the territorial jurisdiction of their courts. Three recent cases, however, illustrate that governments have begun to find ways to hurdle the walls that have traditionally made the recovery of assets in other countries so difficult. This paper aims to sketch the facts of those cases, the legal issues presented and the ways in which the obstacles presented by the walls of sovereignty were overcome.

This paper is the study of three recent cases.

The cases illustrate how obstacles presented by national sovereignty have been overcome.

The cases will serve as a guide to future international cooperation.

The purpose of this paper is to review recent examples of sophisticated money laundering operations involving financial institutions in Eurasia, including Russia and Moldova, and the resulting flow of licit and illicit capital from that part of the world to the UK, the USA, and other Western countries.

Relying on materials from publicly available sources, the study uses several case studies to illustrate various money laundering methods with a view toward identifying common elements and aspects of the schemes that might be considered new or innovative.

In particular, the study examines the roles that lax anti-money laundering compliance by financial institutions and the use of shell corporations designed to conceal the beneficial ownership of the companies and their assets have played in virtually all of the money laundering schemes.

The paper discusses the risks that these emerging money laundering methods pose to Western countries and their financial institutions and the approaches that governments might take to minimize those risks and raise the barriers for the laundering of illicit funds within their jurisdictions.

This article aims to discuss the problems that the USA encountered when it first attempted to enact and apply legislation designed to facilitate the enforcement of foreign asset-preservation orders, the remedial legislation enacted to address those problems, and the recent success the US Government has had under that new legislation in restraining assets at the request of foreign courts so that they may be forfeited under foreign law.

The article reviews the legislative history of the statute enacted to permit the enforcement of foreign restraining orders and analyzes the cases applying that statute before and after its amendment in 2010.

Legislation in the USA now permits the federal courts to register and enforce orders issued by foreign courts for the purpose of preserving assets that are subject to forfeiture under foreign law.

This is a cutting edge topic in which there has been a great deal of new law in the past three years.

It is now common for criminals to generate proceeds of crime in one country and to transfer those proceeds to another country. For example, drug traffickers who generate enormous profits from the sale of cocaine and other controlled substances in the USA will employ professional money launderers to move the money from the USA to financial institutions abroad.

The paper is intended to illustrate the reasons why a legislature contemplating the enactment of a set of comprehensive asset forfeiture statutes to enhance the State's ability to recover the proceeds of crime should include provisions relating to in rem civil forfeiture.

The paper reviews the law‐enforcement situations in which civil forfeiture statutes are essential to the State's ability to recover the proceeds of crime.

The paper concludes that in personam criminal forfeiture statutes, which authorize a court to impose forfeiture as an element of the defendant's sentence in a criminal case, are inadequate, by themselves, to allow the State to recover criminal proceeds, and that in rem civil forfeiture provisions must be included in a legislative scheme for it to be fully effective.

The paper is intended to be of practical value and national legislatures in countries attempting to modernize the law‐enforcement tolls available to them to recover criminal proceeds both domestically and in the global economy.

The paper outlines the reasons why a purely in personam asset forfeiture system that relies on a criminal conviction for the recovery of criminal proceeds in inadequate, and why governments implementing asset forfeiture schemes should make civil in rem forfeiture part of the legislative program.

Describes a new form of money laundering which does not involve proceeds of past crimes but clean money intended to be used to commit future crimes. Adduces the financing of terrorism as the obvious example: the cash for the attacks of September 11 may have been clean, but the purpose was deadly. Points out that, because anti‐money laundering legislation is mostly backward looking, it tends not to address the financing of future crimes. Looks at the initial attempts in US legislation to correct this: the PATRIOT Act made smuggling more than $10,000 currency in or out of the country illegal, while moving money in or out of the country in order to commit a crime was already a crime in itself. Argues that a domestic version of this statute is necessary, and suggests how such a law could be crafted, mentioning Section 1960(b)(1)(c) of the PATRIOT Act.

Describes how asset forfeiture works in the USA; both civil and criminal forfeiture of property are used to recover property involved in crime that crosses national borders, and each has its advantages. Shows how the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act 2000 (CAFRA) and the PATRIOT Act 2001 deal with transnational crime and recovery, applying them to various possible cases: the criminal proceeds are in the USA but the defendant is abroad, the money is in the USA but the crime was committed abroad, the criminal is in the USA but the property is abroad, the crime was committed in the USA but the criminal and/or the money is abroad, and the USA needs foreign government assistance to restrain property and obtain bank records. Deals with particular issues in the last case, such as bank records, attorneys’ fees, and challenges abroad to the restraint on the merits; lastly, mentions how forfeiture of terrorist assets is now covered. Concludes that the PATRIOT Act and its predecessor, CAFRA, have given US law enforcement new powers to seize and confiscate assets involved in international crime; terrorism is the immediate focus, but all criminal activity crossing frontiers can be combated effectively.