Lawyers, notaries, accountants and money laundering

Abstract

Purpose

To call for the legislature to pay more attention to the professional laundering and to improve the capability to attack money laundering.

Design/methodology/approach

By describing the phenomena that money laundering crimes nowadays often involves lawyers, notaries and accounts, to analyze the necessity and rationale of bringing these professionals under the obligations of anti‐money laundering, and to present a reasonable solution to the contradiction between professional privilege and anti‐money laundering obligations.

Findings

In order to keep a balance between the fight against money laundering and the protection of professional privilege, we should make a difference among the professional activities: when professional activities are linked judicial proceedings or in the course of ascertaining the legal position of clients, they would be exempted from the obligation of anti‐money laundering; when they perform financial or company law activities, they should assume anti‐money laundering obligations.

Originality/value

This paper presents a reasonable solution to the contradiction between professional privilege and anti‐money laundering obligations, which would be beneficial to the legislature.

Citation

He, P. (2006), "Lawyers, notaries, accountants and money laundering", Journal of Money Laundering Control, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 62-70. https://doi.org/10.1108/13685200610645229