Last year, the UK Conservative Government announced that it would take action to stop foreigners from buying homes with “plundered or laundered cash” as part a global effort to defeat corruption.
Last week, the UK Government proposed a bill in the House of Commons to help in the fight against money laundering and the financing of terrorism. From the Wall Street Journal:
The Criminal Finances Bill is “one of the most significant changes” to the U.K. anti-money laundering regime in a decade, the government said in a statement. It is part of a broader action plan laid out in April that tackles holes in the U.K. legal regime against money laundering and terrorist financing.
Among the changes in the bill, according to the statement: The government would be able to file civil complaints to seize and forfeit the proceeds of crime, and it would require those suspected of corruption to explain their sources of wealth, in so-called unexplained wealth orders. The orders help facilitate the recovery of illicit wealth and stop criminals from using the U.K. to stash their corrupt proceeds, the statement says…
With other countries tightening their anti-money laundering (AML) regimes, one wonders how long the Australian Government can continue to ignore this issue.
Let’s recall last year’s report from the global regulator, the Paris-based Financial Action Taskforce (FATF), which warned that Australian residential property is a haven for international money laundering, particularly from China, and recommended that Australia implement counter-measures to ensure that real estate agents, lawyers and accountants facilitating real estate transactions are captured by the regulatory net.
FATF’s findings were then backed-up by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), which warned that “laundering of illicit funds through real estate is an established money laundering method in Australia”.
And in May this year, the Statutory Review of the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act 2006 was released, which among other things called for the extension of anti-money laundering (AML) rules to non-financial gatekeepers like real estate agents, lawyers and accountants.
And just last month, AUSTRAC and the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) expressed alarm at the influx of money from the Pearl River Delta region of southern China.
Let’s also recall that the Turnbull Government has deferred indefinitely the implementation of the second tranche AML rules for real estate gate-keepers, despite the Australian Government in 2003 promising FATF that they would be brought under the regulatory net.
By failing to ratify the second tranche AML rules, as promised in 2003, the Australia’s Government is tacitly complicit with the dirty foreign money flooding into Australia’s homes, and is running in contravention with global efforts to police money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
