Blog
Private prosecutions – A route to justice for the charity sector
Sophie Tang
12 March 2019
Estate agents come under the HMRC spotlight
On 4 March, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (“HMRC”) announced that they had imposed a £215,000 fine on Countrywide estate agents for failing to register the company as required under the Money Laundering Regulations 2017. This announcement was swiftly followed by the publication of the Treasury Committee report on economic crime on 8 March, where estate agents came in for stinging criticism for failing to have proper regard to money laundering compliance and risk assessment in their dealings.
4 March 2019
SFO v ENRC: what did the Court of Appeal decide and what does it mean for lawyers?
In September 2018, the Court of Appeal handed down its judgment on ENRC’s appeal against Andrews J’s High Court decision in the case of The Director of the Serious Fraud Office v ENRC. The judgment has been praised for going some way to restore sense and order to the protection of legal professional privilege.
28 February 2019
‘No deal’ is a backwards step for solving crime across borders
Shortly after the referendum result, I attended a meeting in Whitehall to which representatives of a wide range of criminal justice agencies had been invited. Our host, a policy official, told us that Brexit was to be viewed as an opportunity and asked us to identify the specific opportunities Brexit afforded us in our work. There was a stony silence; a tumbleweed moment. We all knew that, as the Institute for Government would later pithily observe, the UK would struggle to invent an arrangement on law enforcement co-operation with the EU that suits it better than the one it has now. What’s more, as matters stand, these arrangements will come to a grinding halt in little over a month. Where will that leave those agencies tasked with dealing with serious cross-border crime?
28 February 2019
New powers to gather electronic evidence from overseas agreed
The Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Act 2019 marks a major departure in the current mutual legal assistance regime in relation to gathering electronic evidence from overseas. Receiving Royal Assent on the 12 February 2019, the act gives powers to law enforcement to apply for an Overseas Production Order (OPO) to obtain electronic data directly from service providers based outside the UK for the purposes of criminal investigations and prosecutions for serious crime.
26 February 2019
Victims of blackmail: will your identity be protected?
For those who find themselves the unfortunate victims of blackmail, often in cases which concern sexually explicit information (‘sextortion’), the choice of how to respond can be extraordinarily difficult. As discussed in our earlier blog, one of the possible responses is to report the matter to the police, which may then result in a subsequent prosecution of the blackmailer.
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