Search results

We conclude in Chapter One that an English criminal court is unlikely to have jurisdiction to try foreign public officials for grand corruption as their wrongful conduct would have taken place overseas.

The purpose of this paper is to critically appraise the legal definition of the offence of money laundering under Malawian law. The goal is to evaluate whether the definition meets international standards and best practices on legal definition of money laundering, particularly as contained in the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNCATOC).

The paper is a doctrinal analysis of the legal definition of the offence of money laundering under Malawian law. It examines the constituent elements of the offence based on the traditional conception of a criminal offence as constituting the prohibited conduct (or actus reus) and the mental element (or mens rea). The paper comparatively evaluates the offence vis-à-vis international standards and best practices, particularly as contained in the UNCATOC.

The paper concludes that the definition is compliant with international standards and best practices.

The paper is based on the statutory definition of the offence, but was unable to examine how the offence is interpreted and applied in concrete cases by Malawian courts. The reason is the lack of any case law through which courts have interpreted and applied the offence.

The paper provides the template for future interpretation and application of the offence by courts in the future.

Enhancing the clarity and certainty in the law on money laundering in Malawi.

The paper is an elucidation of a statutory provision that was recently adopted in Malawi and for which there is no authoritative clarification. The paper, therefore, makes an invaluable contribution to the fight against money laundering in Malawi by being a guide to law enforcers, lawyers, courts and policy/legislative makers.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the present and possible future nature of the legal regime regulating and seeking to control fraud and corruption on the part of directors and officers of companies in the UK.

This paper outlines aspects in the present and future fight against fraud and corruption on the part of directors and officers of companies, particularly with regard to public and listed companies in the UK.

The paper emphasises the need for the UK Government to secure adequate resources for the investigating and enforcement authorities to ensure that the law of fraud and corruption is effectively enforced, rather than pursue a policy of constant enactment of new legislation which is increasingly complex and ineffective.

The paper considers the creation of a new generic offence to supplement the new generic offences created under the Fraud Act 2006, based on the established principle of the fiduciary duty, a duty owed by all directors and officers to their companies. These offences could form the central core of a future legal regime regulating the conduct of directors and officers.

This paper aims to report the results of an investigation into the relationship between corporate boards and the likelihood of a firm being convicted of an environmental offence in the United Kingdom (UK).

The study uses binary logistics regression analysis to model the relationship between corporate boards and the likelihood of a firm being convicted of an environmental offence in the UK, controlling for firm size, financial leverage and profitability.

The results suggest that the likelihood of a firm being convicted of an environmental offence increases with board size but decreases with the presence of a woman on the board. No support is found for the authors’ hypotheses about the proportion of outside directors and the presence of a lawyer on the board. Marginal effects’ results also show that adding one member to the board increases the chance of a firm being convicted for an environmental offence by 4.2 per cent, while having a woman on the board decreases the likelihood of a firm being convicted of an environmental offence by 31.8 per cent.

The sample size of 55 firms is small which could affect the generalisability of the study.

The study uses proprietary data obtained from the UK Environmental Agency to provide evidence for the first time how corporate boards affect the chances of a listed firm being convicted of an environmental offence in the UK.

The Prevention of Money Laundering Act (the PMLA/the Act) was enacted in India in 2002. Since then, Indian courts have had to deal with two interconnected issues owing to the nature of the offence of money laundering (ML) as conceived in the Act itself. The first issue relates to the independence of the offence of ML from the conviction of the underlying offence; and the second is the manner in which the PMLA operates – whether it does so retrospectively or prospectively. The purpose of this paper is to delve into these questions as there is no definitive and binding answer provided for by the courts. It aims to provide normative answers to the above-mentioned questions to enable better functioning of the Act.

This research paper examines international conventions relating to ML, reports by inter-governmental bodies, the statutory language of the Act and judgements rendered by courts.

The paper goes on to conclude that for fulfilling the purpose of the Act, the offence of ML must be considered separate from the conviction of the predicate offence. As a result, it also concludes that the Act must apply in instances where the predicate offence was committed prior to its inclusion in the Act’s Schedule if the act of ML occurs after such inclusion.

There does not exist any scholarly literature addressing the judiciary’s interpretation of the Act regarding the said two issues in a systematic fashion. Added to this is the fact that there exist uncertainty and ambiguity because of conflicting judgements. By analyzing international instruments, the phraseology of the Act and contradictory case-law, this paper attempts to find definitive solutions to the said two questions in a purposive manner.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the anti‐money laundering laws of Hong Kong, in particular the Organised and Serious Crimes Ordinance.

An analysis of the legislation with respect to anti‐money laundering as well as relevant case law.

Hong Kong authorities are serious about fighting money laundering crimes. The statutory scheme in Hong Kong is comprehensive and in line with international standards.

By discussing the key statutory provisions and the important cases, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of the anti‐money laundering laws of Hong Kong. This paper is of value to lawyers, prosecutors, academics, law students, etc. in not only Hong Kong, but in the region including mainland China.

This comparison has been prepared in an effort to assist practitioners when confronted with the main confiscation provisions of legislation as it applies to crime and also to drug trafficking.

This paper aims to focus on the concept of money laundering and explores the evolution and expansion of criminalization of predicate offences to the money laundering within the international anti-money laundering (AML) regime over the time. It proposes how to limit the size and scope of predicate offences in designing a balanced legal definition.

This paper opted a content analysis focussed on the criminalization aspect of offences to money laundering in the international AML regime under the United Nations Conventions (Vienna, Palermo and Corruption Convention) and Financial Action Task Force Standards.

This paper provides how the criminalization of money laundering has evolved and its definition expanded over the time. The international definition is widely drafted with wide range of predicate offences from proceeds of drug money to corruption, including terrorist financing and terrorist acts; however, the two phenomena – money laundering and terrorist financing are quiet distinct apart. This continual expansion of predicate offences quite leads legality issues such as over-criminalization and conflict with principles of criminal law. This paper suggests an approach to limit the size and scope of predicate offences to money laundering.

This paper includes implications for the development of a balanced approach in defining predicate offences through a qualitative limitation approach consistent with the minimalist theory of penalization of criminal law.

This paper attains an identified issue how the legal definition of the money laundering offence can be improved while considering rule of law and principles of criminal law concerns.

Traditional crime linkage studies on serial sexual assaults have relied predominantly on a binary crime linkage approach that has yielded successful results in terms of linkage accuracy. Such an approach is a coarse reflection of reality by focussing mainly on the outcome of an offence, neglecting the forceful differences due to the intricate offender-victim interaction. Only few researchers have examined sexual assaults through the lens of a sequence analysis framework. This paper aims to present the first empirical test of offence sequence-based crime linkage, moving beyond exploratory analyses.

Offence accounts from 90 serial sexual assault and rape victims from the UK were analysed and sequentially coded. Sequence analysis allowed to compare all offences combinations regarding their underlying sequence of events. The resulting comparison was transformed and plotted in two-dimensional space by multidimensional scaling analysis for a visual inspection of linkage potential. The transformed proximities of all offences were used as predictors in a receiver operating characteristic analysis to actually test their discriminatory accuracy for crime linkage purpose.

Sequence analysis shows significant discriminatory accuracy for crime linkage purpose. However, the method does perform less well than previous binary crime linkage studies.

Several limitations due to the nature of the data will be discussed.

The practical limitations are as follows: the study is a potential practical value for crime analysts; it is a complimentary methodology for statistical crime linkage packages; it requires automated coding to be useful; and it is very dependent on crime recoding standards.

The exploratory part of this study has been published in a book chapter in 2015. However, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the succinct test of crime linkage accuracy is the first of its kind.

The purpose of this paper is to consider the rationale behind the approaches to organised crime in criminal law to understand the basis of the law on conspiracy in England and Wales and why this country has refused to amend conspiracy in favour of a membership offence or a criminal enterprise model, similar to the USA’s offences.

The analysis is based on a legal comparison between the law of conspiracy in England and Wales and the USA’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) statute, as example of best practice targeting criminal enterprises. The legal comparison is also substantiated by case law examples and interviewees with prosecutors and lawyers collected both in London and in New York City.

After briefly describing how the two systems (English and American) are intended to work, the paper will develop a discussion on the difficulties and advantages of introducing a RICO-style legislation in England and Wales and shall conclude that it is the way organised crime is socially perceived in the English/British scenario that justifies the choice to remain on the level of conspiracy and not move towards membership/enterprise offences.

This study shall be primarily intended as an opportunity to assess the criminal law tools in the fight against organised crime available in England and Wales. The comparative side of this research, the RICO statute, would require more attention which this paper cannot give for reasons of brevity. Therefore, the study is a preliminary study in comparative criminal law.

The central idea of this work is to suggest that differences in criminal law are based on different perceptions of the wrongfulness of the offending. For the law to change in favour of a criminal enterprise offence in England and Wales, there is a need to reshape the wrongfulness of organised crime. A study into the wrongfulness of organised crime as a criminal offence, with a comparative outlook, has never been conducted before in England and Wales.