In February the Supreme Court handed down judgment in R (on the application of KBR, Inc) v Director of the Serious Fraud Office, in which it unanimously reversed a 2018 High Court ruling on the territorial scope of section 2(3) of the Criminal Justice Act 1987. Section 2(3) empowers the SFO director to issue a notice […]
NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) are a new kind of digital asset that operate on blockchain. Most NFTs run on the Ethereum blockchain but are not themselves Ether. The concept of non-fungibility is important to distinguish their function in that fungible tokens like Bitcoin or Ether can be exchanged like-for-like. Read more
The CPS’s Economic Crime Strategy 2025, the first of its sort, was introduced to combat what the CPS refers to as ‘a serious and growing area of criminality’. The number of fraud and forgery cases dealt with by the CPS has risen by almost a third since 2011. The CPS estimates that there are 800,000 […]
“The strange thing about this current economic climate is that no one knows if we will go into a recession or not”, says Keith Oliver. “The last recession followed a strong bull market, but this time around it’s different. There is pent-up demand and lots of cheap assets. If we do see more fraud come […]
We are delighted to announce that Keith Oliver and Amalia Neenan have authored a chapter in the latest CDR Essential Intelligence – Fraud, Asset Tracing & Recovery 2021 publication. Keith also served as the Contributing Editor for the 2021 edition. Due to the worldwide economic downturn in the wake of Covid-19, the threat of fraud […]
We are excited to announce that sanctions expert Anna Bradshaw has been appointed by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) as an Associate Fellow of the Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies (CFCS) programme. Anna will be using her sanctions expertise to assist with CFCS research on the design and implementation of sanctions by […]
The pervasiveness of social media has complicated the application of contempt of court rules. P&P expert Anna Bradshaw says, “the pitfalls are many. The biggest issue is that so few people appear to be aware of them. It is something that you would expect journalists to be familiar with but perhaps not all other users […]
The cum-ex scandal began in 2017 when the German authorities opened fraud investigations into hundreds of banks and individuals over involvement in so-called cum-ex trading fraud between 2001 and 2011. Cum-ex transactions allowed investors to exploit a legal loophole that allegedly enabled multiple parties to reclaim billions of euros of tax they never paid on […]
Our senior partner Michael O’Kane will be speaking at a Volterra Fietta webinar on 25 March 2021 at 13:00 GMT. The panel will discuss the global human rights sanctions regime adopted by the Council of the EU on 7 December 2020, and the UK’s emerging autonomous human rights sanctions regime. Register here.
UWOs are very effective in assisting the authorities to discover the source of income used to acquire property or to identify an ultimate beneficial owner, especially those in offshore structures according to P&P expert Rachel Cook. She says, “whatever their limits, for those faced with UWOs, it will have been a worrying, time-consuming and expensive […]
