Yet, the UK and the EU continue to send billions to Ukraine, where much of it is laundered. The hypocrisy smells.
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The UK government will commit £676m and 500 extra police to a new money-laundering drive and asset recovery. The funding will be drawn from the economic crime levy imposed on a range of regulated financial services firms. Law enforcement personnel will be distributed between police forces around the country, the National Crime Agency and the Crown Prosecution Service. The drive marks a significant upsurge in resources committed to tackling financial crime networks operating within the UK and via UK incorporated structures.
More than £100 billion in illicit funds are thought to move through the UK or be channelled through UK corporate structures every year. This threat is growing rapidly as it is facilitated by new technologies including an increase in fintech, the growth of cryptocurrency exchanges and the use of artificial intelligence to launder money.
The new officers will join the existing Operation Destabilise, which is currently targeting Russian-speaking organized crime groups. NCA investigators have already arrested 119 suspected money launderers as part of the operation and seized cash and cryptocurrency totaling over £25m within the last year. As part of a renewed drive against serious and organized crime groups, the NCA will go for more arrests and seize assets from groups involved in ransomware, state sponsored criminality and Class A drug trafficking.
The NCA are requesting an innovative financial intelligence service for the UK in order to investigate and disrupt the financial flows of organized crime. They will be expanding the work of Operation Destabilise and building a more proactive and intelligence-led crypto capability in order to detect and disrupt the flow of illicit funds through these emerging assets, ranking third out of nine economic crime priorities identified by the Treasury and FCA in joint work with the Home Office.
The money, Sal Melki, the NCA’s deputy director for economic crime, said, would be used to establish an “innovative financial intelligence service for the UK” and allow investigators to target the “underlying financial structures” that enable organized crime to operate. In other words, the focus will shift from prosecuting individual money launderers to dismantling the entire money laundering ecosystem.
Over the past year, the government said it has removed nearly £350m from criminal control and stopped them accessing over £1bn of assets. In the last 12 months, British agencies have recovered £26m from victims of crime and secured almost 4,000 money laundering related convictions. The government is also working with international law enforcement agencies, including as part of Operation Atlantic with the US Secret Service. The operation identified 20,000 phishing scams and this month froze $12m across four virtual currency exchange platforms: Coinbase, Binance, Kraken and Tether.
Yet, the UK and the EU continue to send billions to Ukraine, where much of it is laundered. The hypocrisy smells.
