Impacts upon Substantive Laundering Law

Thus far the book has traced the curious development of AML, and questioned the empirical foundations upon which the AML/CFT movement was established, and of the narrative underpinning the AML industry. It would be surprising if this series of developments had given rise to a neat, easily comprehensible and rationally defensible set of substantive laws, whose application in any unforeseen cases judges were able easily to divine. That is not what happened. The charge sheet is as follows. AML law has brought a very serious criminal offence into existence without a clear idea of what was wrong with it. It has failed to properly assess the nature of the principle against allowing a criminal to benefit from his/her crime, and in particular without a clear limiting principle based upon its application. It has legislated at every level on the repeated but baseless assumption that financial institutions are endangered by laundering. It has on successive occasions allowed incremental expansion of that crime without appropriate reassessments, and it has afforded insufficient significance to the distinction between crimes with and without victims. It is suggested that for predatory offences restitution to victims rather than confiscation by the government is the appropriate response.