Why Are Proceeds Of Crime Indictments Included With Many Criminal Matters These Days?

When a fraud was committed it was not always clear what law had been broken. The Theft Act was often used, and a great favourite was using the equitable offence of Conspiracy to Defraud. The Fraud Act 2006 was an attempt to encompass all offences within a single piece of legislation and was intended to do away with the inclusion of various different offences under the likes of the Theft Act and many other pieces of legislation.

But a great many fraud cases will now include offences also under POCA 2002 (amended in 2008). This means that separate offences of money laundering are brought into the matter.

The laundering of money is a term applied to the way criminals deal with their ill gotten gains. However the money or assets are stolen, the money has to be spent eventually and the assets realised and also turning into money. They must be able to do this in a way that they seem to be spending legitimate money obtained from a bone fide source. Thus stolen funds must be laundered. Money laundering involves positioning the stolen money into the general financial system, hiding its source by moving it around and then taking it from the system as "clean" money that cannot be traced back to crime. Any part of the process, a single transaction involving criminal funds, can be considered to be money laundering.

The Proceeds of Crime Act introduced stringent penalties for persons involved in money laundering. Once convicted of this type of offence the Crown can apply drastic assumptions that it couldn't during the trial, concerning all property and transactions going back six years. The result of being indicted for money laundering is the requirement for explaining all your financial activity over an extended period to show that you were not a lifestyle criminal.

Where some financial gain has been obtained during a crime it is easy to add a money laundering charge. Even not paying after filling up your car with fuel could subsequently result in a money laundering count being added, though this may be the extreme case. It is easy to attract a money laundering indictment by simply inflating your salary declared when applying for a mortgage, even though you subsequently paid all the installments on time and even paid off the loan completely.

What it is not always easy to do is to defend the subsequent and inevitable attempts by the Crown to confiscate all your assets under the criminal lifestyle assumptions they are then able to make. Sometimes it is not always possible to prove even where legitimate income has come from. Cash businesses are particularly vulnerable, and the need for keeping credible records is important. Decided cases have shown that failure to keep adequate records will not be accepted by a Court.

In the same way, side earning from the like of eBay or gifts from family members will always be assumed to be criminal receipts. Most of us fail to record the source of family gifts or money from frien lent to buy a house or a deposit on a car - however getting involved for whatever reason in a minor crime they open up the possibility of losing everything they have.

The money laundering offences within the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 are very powerful tools for the regulators who will use them whenever they can to make the chance of a positive outcome for them more likely. Their use does not mean that justice might not be carried out and innocent victims will lose their homes and savings. It does however mean that the process of defending a criminal matter has become a much more complicated affair, with the need of additional experts such as forensic accountants increasing in order that the fairest outcome is still obtained.

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