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Banks have more at stake than ever before through risk management. The authors, both London lawyers specialising in the financial services world, argue that technology has both made life easier and harder. But they stress that the same problems recur in every case of loss. They provide some examples, particularly from the world of derivatives, which underline how important it is to employ a systematic approach.

A further illustration of the increasing grip of the law of equity in enabling monies that are part of a fraud to be recovered by the victim is provided by the Privy Council decision in Attorney‐General for Hong Kong v Warwick Reid. Previous decisions of English and Commonwealth courts based on the old established principles of equity have employed a constructive trust to recover monies that are the proceeds of fraud or are part of a fraudulent design. AG for Hong Kong v Reid showed how the constructive trust would operate to enable the Crown to recover bribes that had been paid to a Hong Kong public officer.

As the commercial activities undertaken by companies have a deeper impact on our lives, it has been recognised as increasingly important to control corporate activities. Control is provided by the criminal law and by statutory or quasi statutory regulation whose purpose is to outlaw corporate activity considered unacceptable in order to protect employees, the environment, investors, or other sections of the general public.

Gone are the days when a bank could concentrate on providing a reliable service to its customer, and maintain that as part of that service it could guard the confidentiality of all information learnt in the course of the customer's banking. Formerly, a customer could be relatively confident that information about his or her business affairs would not be disclosed save in fairly limited circumstances, and the bank would not trouble itself as to how these affairs were conducted. Current legislation and regulation requires a bank to be aware of the commercial background to its clients' dealings and, in certain circumstances, to take steps to report criminal conduct or to account to third parties.

A unifying theme apparent at this year's Symposium was the need for balance when lifting the veil of bank secrecy: (1) the need to protect civil liberties versus the need to fight crime; (2) the bank's need to balance its role as policeman while furthering its commercial objectives; (3) the necessity of weighing international cooperation against the awareness that individual nations jealously guard their own legislative regime; (4) the dichotomy of technology that serves both to protect and penetrate secrecy; (5) the balance required when investigating crimes.

Enforcement of regulatory controls has traditionally been left to the criminal law. In the last 15 years there has been an increasing interest in using civil remedies for this purpose. Most of the attention has been on financial services, but there have been recent developments in the UK planning system, which provide interesting parallels.

Information is power — so it has been said — and nowhere has this statement been realised more significantly than in the banking industry. IT and banking in the 1990s and going forward to the next millennium are tightly bonded. It is now more difficult to determine whether business drives technology or the other way round. Given this scenario, one of the most important facets of managing IT in a bank is that of information security.

Section 2 of the Criminal Justice Act 1987 abrogates the right to silence since a suspect is required to answer questions in pre‐trial investigations by the SFO, although the answers are inadmissible as evidence unless proceedings are brought under s. 2(14) for giving false information or by s. 2(8), where the individual ‘makes a statement inconsistent with it’. In a previous article, the writer has considered the necessity and effectiveness of s. 2 powers. It is also instructive to analyse the conceptual basis of s. 2 powers since this will aid in the interpretation of statutory ambiguities and will allow the courts to have a uniformity of approach when seeking to resolve the statutory ambiguities. The conceptual basis is also important as concerns the resolution of where the line lies between the effective investigation of offences pursuant to s. 2 and the rights of the individual subject to such questioning. A critical examination of the above issues demands steering a careful course between normative rules and theory: in this area above all others it is impossible and undesirable to divorce one from the other.

The short answer is no. Notable examples of anti‐corruption laws are available. But there is probably no single example that one would elevate to a definitive universal model. This short briefing will focus first on the multilateral efforts of the Organization of the American States (OAS) against corruption and secondly, on the new anti money‐laundering legislation of the Bahamas with references to other major countries, as another perspective apart from the perspectives of other regions.