The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, published last week, will introduce identity verification for all new and existing company directors, people with significant control and those delivering documents to Companies House. It will tighten registration requirements for limited partnerships, require them to maintain a connection to the UK and enable the registrar to deregister dormant partnerships.
The Bill speeds up and increases powers to recover cryptoassets, enables more information-sharing between businesses on economic crime, and focuses anti-money laundering regulation on high-value activity.
However, the Bar Council highlighted it is not the role of lawyers to prevent or detect crime and warned a provision in the Bill to add a regulatory objective to the Legal Services Act 2007 may be incompatible with barristers’ duties.
Bar Council chair Mark Fenhalls KC said: ‘Creating more regulation will do nothing to address the problem.
‘The legal professions are already subject to targeted anti-money laundering legislation and a new regulatory objective may not be compatible with our role in representing clients.’
Aziz Rahman, senior partner at Rahman Ravelli, said the Bill ‘was rushed through earlier this year due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, making a further Bill inevitable’.
He said the reforms to limited partnerships, which have been used to potentially dodge anti-money laundering laws, would lead to increased transparency.
‘The expansion of the Serious Fraud Office’s (SFO) s 2A powers of information gathering to cover other types of crime is also significant, although unsurprising given the international nature of SFO investigations into fraud and money laundering, as well as bribery and corruption,’ Rahman said.
‘Whilst there may be a risk of overuse, it should better inform the SFO Director’s assessment on whether to formally commence an investigation.’
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