The National Crime Agency has now published its annual review of Suspicious Activity Reports – in simple terms, where someone suspects possible money laundering and has reported it.
In total, there were 381,882 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in 2014/215, with hardly any of them coming from estate agents.
The review finds that the banking sector made 83.39% of all SARs, accountants and tax advisors made 1.21%, legal professionals 1%, and estate agents only 0.09%.
During the reporting period, a number of SARs were thought to have been possibly related to terrorism: 1,899 SARs were disseminated to the National Terrorist Financial Investigation Unit and Counter Terrorist Units.
This was an increase of 42% on the same period in the previous year.
The average turnaround time for responses to those reporting suspicious activity was 4.7 days, an increase from 4.3 days in the previous year.
Law firm Kingsley Napley said the new figures show an improvement in reporting statistics, but said: “There is clearly still a lot of room for improvement, particularly among the legal, estate agent and accounting sectors.”
Release of the figures comes as estate agency firm Jackson Grundy has won a fight to get an initial huge fine sharply reduced.
The judge said in the ruling that the failings had been technical, not substantive, adding: “The OFT never suggested that a single fraudster or intending terrorist had slipped through the net and we would have been astonished … had this in fact occurred.”
EYE will be returning to this subject as we continue to digest the judgement, which we strongly suggest should be read in its entirety by agents, and we would be grateful for the opinions of both you and your advisers.
Decision in Jackson Grundy Limited
Comments (4)
Mortgage advisor does it, solicitor does it – why does the estate agent do it too?
I will admit that it is possible to buy a property without a mortgage, but if you don’t use a solicitor then you won’t be using an estate agent – although it is possible the other way round…
Screaming waste of time except for one thing – Know you client.
But, if anyone really wants to get away with it then they’ll get past me – an agent with 24 years experience.
According to a previous client (head of some task force or other – I know exactly but couldn’t possibly tell you all) £500 gets you a fake passport with your picture on it and the details you need to organise a dodgy deal.
If you are laundering thousands of pounds then £500 suddenly becomes irrelevant.
The only time we made a report is was ignored. We never heard anything at all in response.
Still by my crude maths close to 400 reported cases.
Lets be honest its not easy to money launder through property and even harder for an estate agent to spot it.
Unless of course you are a *Russian Government official on a channel 4 TV show openly asking for help money laundering its not easy to spot.
* Good to see that a year later no action has been taken on these agents from there redress or governing bodies despite them saying they will investigate. Nicely swept under the carpet.
Does this not confirm that the work imposed on estate agents is completely disproportionate to the potential outcome?
Why could HMRC not use profiling of SDLT submissions and where there is a suspicion place a charge on the property until such stage as the owner had satisfied HMRC that there is nothing suspicious about the source of the funds used to purchase. My bank seems to find it easy enough to profile attempted purchases abroad and prevent them until I can confirm it is me who has attempted to make the purchase. Surely it would be easy for HMRC to come up with a similar system.