The UK has laws in place to combat money laundering, but can it enforce them?

Editor’s note: Published on the source site under the title “The enabler’s advantage: Can the UK close the gap?”

Professional enablers – lawyers, accountants and corporate service providers – supply the structures, legitimacy and anonymity that allow illicit funds to move and persist. Targeting them has become an increasingly important part of the UK’s response to illicit finance. The question is whether the tools now in place can be translated into effective enforcement.

A strong legal framework

Successive UK governments have progressively strengthened the legislative framework, from the Bribery Act 2010 and the Criminal Finances Act 2017 to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. Reform accelerated under Keir Starmer, with the Anti-Corruption Strategy 2025, the appointment of Baroness Margaret Hodge as Anti-Corruption Champion, and confirmation that the Financial Conduct Authority would consolidate anti-money laundering supervision across professional services. The ECCTA’s failure to prevent fraud offence, in force since September 2025, makes large organisations criminally liable where an associated person commits fraud for their benefit.

With an estimated £100 billion laundered through the UK each year, the scale of the challenge remains considerable – but the legal architecture has never been stronger.

Enforcement has not kept pace

Two high-profile cases illustrate the gap between ambition and delivery. In 2020 the NCA pursued unexplained wealth orders over three London properties worth around £80 million linked to Dariga Nazarbayeva and her son Nurali Aliyev; the court discharged all three orders and the adverse costs order of £1.5 million represented over a third of the agency’s annual anti-corruption budget. In June 2026, a London jury cleared former Nigerian oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke of all six bribery charges after a five-month trial, closing a 13-year investigation.

Spotlight on Corruption identified structural failures in how the Alison-Madueke case was built, and attributed serious delays to outdated technology, skills shortages and high staff turnover within the NCA’s International Corruption Unit. Neither case involved the prosecution of professional enablers, but both illustrate the capacity constraints UK authorities face in complex cross-border financial crime work.

Prosecution of enablers themselves remains exceedingly rare. Spotlight on Corruption’s court monitoring programme found just one corporate criminal conviction of a bank for money laundering in UK legal history, and the NCA’s Combating Kleptocracy Cell is reportedly operating at only 50% capacity.

Signs of movement

The FCA is to become the Single Professional Services Supervisor, consolidating the functions of 22 professional body supervisors and addressing a weakness identified in FATF’s 2018 mutual evaluation. The regulator has already issued its first-ever public censure of a professional body supervisor. The Serious Fraud Office has also joined France and Switzerland in a new International Anti-Corruption Prosecutorial Taskforce.

An unfinished agenda

Andy Burnham’s government inherits a strengthened legislative framework, a supervisory reform programme in motion, a new multilateral prosecutorial alliance and the Countering Illicit Finance Summit scheduled for December 2026. His inaugural speech made no explicit reference to illicit finance or anti-corruption, leaving open how prominently these issues will feature.

The timing is consequential. The UK assumed the FATF Presidency on 1 July 2026 under Giles Thomson, with a stated focus on fraud, risk-based supervision and cross-border enforcement – precisely the areas in which its own record is being tested – and will take on the G20 Presidency in 2027.

Article Credit: https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/uk-professional-enablers-illicit-finance/