Payback time

The recovery of criminal property is driven by two quite different considerations, writes Alan Osborn – first as a deterrent to financial crime and second as a means of compensating the victim through restitution. Clearly, where the fight against money laundering in concerned, the first is the more important. Vincent Schmoll, principal administrator of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the world’s AML standard setter, said there is a FATF Recommendation (No. 3) that member countries set up some kind of procedure for managing confiscated assets. “The purpose of a financial investigation is to follow the money – to use the money trails to get to the criminal and to confiscate the money. The idea is to get enough money back to make it as painful for perpetrators as possible -it’s not done with the idea of making restitution to the victims necessarily,” he told MLB. More recently, however, there has been a tendency in some countries to pay more attention to the restitution factor in considering asset recovery legislation.