The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) last week fined three separate estate agents, based in London, Northamptonshire and Cardiff respectively, a total of £246,665 for failing to comply with money laundering regulations. It is another example of the increased focus by regulatory authorities on compliance issues.

The Money Laundering Regulations 2007 are designed to prevent businesses from being used for money laundering or terrorist financing purposes and require regulated businesses to, for example, apply risk sensitive policies and procedures on the verification of customer identity, record keeping, training staff and reporting suspicious activity to the National Crime Agency.

In all three cases, says the OFT, the failures were found to be significant and widespread and included:

• Failures to apply adequate customer due diligence measures when carrying out estate agency work.
• Failures to conduct ongoing monitoring of business relationships.
• Failures to establish and maintain appropriate policies and procedures on adequate record-keeping, internal controls or risk assessments.
• Failures to train relevant employees in how to recognise and deal with transactions and other activities which may be related to money laundering and terrorist financing.

The companies in question have four weeks to appeal against the fines.

If you suspect that your company has committed a regulatory breach or a criminal offence we can help. Our business investigations team is led by Jeffrey Lewis and includes fraud, regulatory, money laundering, bribery and corruption, insider dealing, and tax and VAT specialists who are listed as leading practitioners by all the major legal ranking directories.

Contact Lewis Nedas’ Criminal Lawyers in London

If you have been charged with money laundering offences and require specialist legal advice, please contact our solicitors Jeffrey Lewis or Siobhain Egan on 020 7387 2032 or complete our online enquiry form here.

This blog post is intended as a news item only – no connection between Lewis Nedas and the parties concerned is intended or implied.