Blog

Update

‘To reduce and prevent financial crime, we have a strengthened authorisation process, improved assessments of regulated firms, deployed more staff to investigate and prosecute offenders and continued to take down hundreds of scam websites.’ (Page 7)

‘In 2022/23, we opened 613 financial crime supervision cases, an increase of 65% from the previous year and an increase of 10% from our 2020/2021 baseline figure of 548.’ (Page 15)

‘In 2022/23 we invested in improving our ability to ensure we kept firms at risk of being used as conduits for financial crime out at the Authorisations Gateway. The rate of Rejection, Withdrawal and Refusals (RWR) for Annex I institutions applying to register under the Money Laundering Regulations (MLRs) increased slightly (24% compared with 21% in 2021/22). In other applications for registration under the MLRs, such as for UK cryptoasset businesses, we see a higher RWR rate. For the financial year of 2022/23 we registered 7%, with the remaining 93% either being rejected, withdrawn or refused.’ (Page 39)

Serious Fraud Office

‘We secured the conviction of eight business executives for economic crimes worth hundreds of millions of pounds. In May, Andrew Skeene and Omari Bowers, the executives behind Global Forestry Investments (GFI), both received 11-year sentences, for their role in a fraudulent investment scheme which purported to support indigenous communities and plant trees in the Amazon but deceived around 2,000 investors out of £37m. In August, we secured a 14-year sentence for Timothy Schools, a disbarred lawyer who defrauded investors in a network of legal firms out of £100 million, while siphoning off money for himself through a company named ATM Solicitors.’

‘Beyond prosecutions and investigations, our proceeds of crime team recovered £95.2 million through confiscation orders on behalf of the taxpayer, more than doubling what we recovered in the previous financial year. We also obtained an account forfeiture order for over $7.7 million, the highest amount ever recovered from a single bank account in the UK. We also kept up the pace on recovering assets following past successful prosecutions, with a further £1 million recovered and returned to victims from Jeffrey Revell-Reade, the fraudster behind the world’s largest ‘boiler room’ scam who was convicted of conspiracy to defraud and sentenced to over nine years’ imprisonment.’ (Page 16)

Links: https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/annual-reports/annual-report-2022-23.pdf

https://www.sfo.gov.uk/download/annual-report-accounts-2022-23/