With a huge financial centre and a preference for light-touch regulation, Britain was an ideal place to rinse stained money
. London has oodles of luxury property, an ideal repository for large bundles of cash in need of washing. Lawyers, bankers and other professionals offer reassuringly discreet, and expensive, service. Add in the draw of top-notch schools and universities, and no wonder the National Crime Agency thinks the country has a money-laundering problem amounting to £100bn a year.
Reducing the amount of dirty money flowing into the country will therefore be hard. It requires further action in four areas in particular: the law itself; the conduct of those who practise it; the court system; and, above all, enforcement of the rules.Start with the law. As well as liking destinations that respect the rule of law, kleptocrats also flock to places where financial secrecy is most strongly enshrined. Britain is a curate’s egg.
The government has proposed reforms to curb “lawfare”. These include strengthening the public-interest defence, capping costs claimants can recover and giving judges the right to throw spurious cases out earlier. Anti-corruption campaigners and an American congressman have called for visa bans and other sanctions against lawyers who work for dodgy plutocrats.
Lawyers’ views of how they should act particularly matter in Britain, argues Mr Barrington, because its legal system rests on the self-policing of behaviour. “One of the good things about our system is that it has been long-established with behavioural checks and balances. It was upheld and carried by the lawyers themselves. Now we are seeing what happens when those standards are upended.
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