The Home Office and Treasury have published “Economic Crime Plan 2“, a 3 year plan to build on existing and create new initiatives in fighting economic crime. Key initiatives and plans include:
- getting 475 new financial crime investigators;
- a new crypto cell pooling expertise across enforcement agencies and regulators;
- an expanded “combatting kleptocracy” cell;
- a new approach to public-private prioritisation;
- reform of the supervisory regime; and
- improved technology.
The Government wants to:
- enable legitimate economic growth by:
- reducing money laundering and recovering more criminal assets – including limiting abuse of UK corporate structures, increasing the effectiveness of the AML/CFT regime, combating criminal use of cryptoassets, and SARs reform to improve intelligence;
- combating kleptocracy and driving down sanctions evastion; and
- cutting fraud
- reduce the threat international illicit finance poses to the UK and UK interests, which it will enable through cross-cutting system capabilities and reform; and
- assess the impact through monitoring and evaluation.
It proposes consultation in Q2 2023 on changes to the supervisory regime, and in Q4 on proposed amendments to the MLRs, following comments received during its previous consultation on the effectiveness of the MLRs. The SARs regime reform has already started, but more actions are planned for the rest of the year and into 2024.