Last year, Transparency International estimated £6.7bn of UK property had been bought with dirty money.
The UK has become the ‘jurisdiction of choice for people with dirty money’, a fringe event on ending the UK’s dirty money problem has heard at Labour Party conference.
Labour MP Margaret Hodge, the chair of the APPG on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, told the audience that she blamed both main parties for the UK becoming a hotbed of dirty money and that ‘deregulation had not helped’, as she called on the next Labour government to make tackling dirty money a high priority issue.
Last year, Transparency International estimated £6.7bn of UK property had been bought with dirty money.
Hodge told those gathered at the event, which also featured Labour MP Liam Byrne and Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Kensington & Bayswater Joe Powell, that there were 4 main ways to tackle the UK’s dirty money problem.
She highlighted the importance of smart regulation, not just for its own sake but regulation that works as well as the need for greater transparency to be able to follow the money.
Hodge also highlighted that enforcement was crucial, as regulations and tougher laws were no good without having good regulation, calling for the National Crime Agency to be beefed up and funded properly for it to be able to carry out its duties.
The MP for Barking also called for greater accountability, with the event told that
prosecutions for money laundering have declined by 56% since 2010.
With the Labour Party ahead in the polls, attention has turned to what an incoming Labour government should do when in office to crack down on dirty money and its flow in the UK.
Liam Byrne MP told the audience that ‘all of us on this platform are fighting legal actions from bad people who are using the English legal system to shut down free speech and democratically elected politicians’.
He told the event that three things needed to happen from the Labour Party to tackle dirty money. He called for greater transparency with ‘a disinfectant of sunlight running through the money coming through this country’.
Byrne also said that we needed to be able to harness the power of civil society and journalists and ‘stop English courts being used to shut down journalists so that crimes of an economic nature could be reported’.
He also added that enforcement agencies had to be ‘geared up to do the job they need to do’.
Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward
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