RT Article
T1 Lawyers as money laundering enablers? An evolving and contentious relationship
JF Global crime
VO 23
IS 2
SP 126
OP 147
A1 Levi, Michael 1948-
LA English
YR 2022
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1837028001
AB Using limited datasets and case studies drawn from the Global North and South, this article critically considers the available evidence about the involvement of lawyers in elite money laundering and attempts to control their involvement. In addition to lawyers’ lobbying and drafting laws , the normal focus of the ‘enablers’ discourse is on lawyers using expert knowledge and legal professional privilege/professional secrecy to facilitate frauds and to conceal the criminal origins of the funds of others. In few known laundering-for-others casesis there much evidence that lawyer assistance goes beyond doing their normal business: setting up constructions for clients that avoid external scrutiny is usually legal. It is implausible to fully resolve the extent to which lawyer ‘enablers’ are, respectively, naïve, negligent, wilfully blind and/or intentionally criminal. Within-firm supervision and both real and expected regulatory/criminal justice/reputational controls may have an impact, but the evidence base for assessing control effectiveness remains weak.
K1 Lawyers
K1 Corruption
K1 legal professional privilege
K1 Money Laundering
K1 Organised Crime
K1 secrecy havens
DO 10.1080/17440572.2022.2089122