On reflecting on the year ahead, for the time being we’ve decided to stop blogging in 2018.
For Practical Law customers, we’ll be collating a monthly summary, highlighting key developments, and sharing it via our customer emails. We’ll publish the first one at the end of this month (January 2018).
Thank you for your support, comments and readership over the past few years. We look forward to sharing our monthly bulletin with you.
2017 was, once again, a very busy year in the business crime world. It was a year when Deferred Prosecution Agreements (DPAs) came of age, when the boundaries of legal professional privilege narrowed, when the scope of failure to prevent offences was expanded to tax offences and threatened to become even wider, when one of the most famous cases in criminal law was discarded by the Supreme Court and when the government left it to the very last minute to enact the Fourth Directive on Money Laundering. Many of these developments will have considerable impact in 2018.
The Thomson Reuters Company Secretary forum was held on the 23 November 2017, the day after the Autumn budget in which the Chancellor announced a potential new corporate criminal offence . Continue reading
On 24 October 2017 the law firm Appleby confirmed that they had been subject to a ‘data security incident’ in 2016. Appleby also confirmed that it had received enquiries from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), which had published the Panama Papers in 2016, regarding the data breach. Continue reading
In a surprising Supreme Court judgment concerning a civil dispute over gambling winnings, the leading criminal case on dishonesty, R v Ghosh, was heavily criticised, deemed not to correctly represent the law and “judicial directions based upon it ought no longer to be given”. This judgment will impact on all future cases where dishonesty is an issue. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this decision was the largely uncontroversial nature of the “Ghosh test”, which had neither seen sustained criticism of its fairness, nor any apparent difficulty with its application. Continue reading
Earlier this week, the National Crime Agency (NCA) published the Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) Annual Report for 2017, which covered 18 months between October 2015 and March 2017. SARS are received by the United Kingdom Financial Intelligence Unit (UKFIU). Unsurprisingly, UKFIU has continued to experience a year on year increase in the number of SARs received. The next report is likely to be more interesting, given the significant number of developments scheduled to the “anti-money laundering” provisions in 2017-18. Continue reading
The criminal offence of failure to prevent the facilitation of tax evasion comes into force on 30 September 2017. The offence is the second “failure to prevent” offence, although a consultation on further offences was launched in early 2017. The offence is similar to section 7 of the Bribery Act 2010, which introduced the corporate offence of failure to prevent bribery. The offences are effectively strict liability, in that no mens rea is required on the part of those representing the corporation. Both offences also have similar defences, although described as “prevention” rather than “adequate” procedures for the tax offence. In more than six years there has not been a contested prosecution of the section 7 Bribery Act offence, which raises the question of how many prosecutions will occur under the Criminal Finances Act 2017? Continue reading
Statistics for the first quarter of 2017 show a record low in the number facing prosecution but record high in number of convictions. Fraud, which has not previously been counted in the annual crimes recorded figures is now the most commonly experienced crime in England and Wales, with 3.4 million incidents in the year ending March 2017 (for more information see: Police Force Area crime statistics published). Over half of these (57%, 1.9 million incidents) were cyber-related. For more information, see National Audit Office confirm fraud is the most commonly experienced crime in England & Wales.
The news that Big Ben will cease to ring following the chimes at noon on Monday 21 August was met with opposition from both MPs and the media. The restoration project has been planned since 2015 and details of the project approved by three parliamentary committees. Part of these plans include silencing the bell until 2021 while the restoration work takes place with exceptions being made for special occasions such as Remembrance Sunday and New Year’s Eve. Continue reading
Last week saw the disturbing news from the National Crime Agency (NCA) that the criminal offences of modern slavery and human trafficking are far more prevalent in the UK than previously thought. On 10 August the NCA released figures showing there are currently more than 300 live policing operations targeting modern slavery in the UK, including: Continue reading