Asset Laundering In The UK - Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) are people who hold a public function and as a result, present higher risks of being involved in bribery or corruption. Offshore leaks have revealed repeatedly that PEPs use British finance and British offshore jurisdictions to launder their wealth, hide their wealth and re-invest it into the global financial system.
Asset Laundering In The UK
UK is the leading country for laundering money
growth of London as a centre for financial and professional services coincided with the collapse of the USSR and the rise of post-Soviet kleptocracies in the 1990s. These states and their elites have since become a major source of clients for UK-based services firms and of investors in UK assets.
failures of enforcement and implementation of the law – plus the exploitation of loopholes by professional enablers –
have meant that little has been done in practice to prevent kleptocratic wealth and political agendas from entering Britain.
this paper (from 2021) details how the UK is ill-equipped to assess the risk of corruption from transnational kleptocracy, which has undermined the integrity of important domestic institutions and weakened the rule of law
And this from 2024
analysis of more than 1,600 ‘anti-money laundering (AML) events’ recorded across the UK in the last decade shows money laundering is the most prevalent issue (27.5%), a new report has revealed.
https://www.ifcreview.com/news/2024/february/uk-aml-compliance-failures-are-rife-in-the-uk/
And Partners in Crime report was the first to expose the scale of abuse of this type of company, with a conservative estimate putting the economic damage caused in the hundreds of billions of pounds, much of this flowing out of Russia
This research lays bare the seemingly industrial-scale abuse of UK LLPs and how this type of company being used to facilitate billions in economic harm & substantial proportion of LLPs showing red flags for use in high-end money laundering