The U.K. government launched a more aggressive anti-corruption offensive, vowing to hunt down the lawyers, accountants and financial professionals who help criminals and sanctioned oligarchs launder their wealth through Britain’s economy.
The new strategy outlines more than 120 commitments across government and includes 15 million pounds (over $20 million) in new funding to expand the City of London Police’s Domestic Corruption Unit. Officials say the plan aims to close legal loopholes and strengthen the country’s defenses against illicit finance.
To disrupt professionals who “enable corruption,” the document aims to go after practices such as creating opaque company structures, providing specialized legal or financial services to conceal assets, and knowingly facilitating corrupt transactions. Lawyers, accountants, bankers and trust and company service providers are explicitly named as priority targets for disruption and enforcement.
A key element of the plan is reforming how professional-services firms are regulated for anti–money laundering supervision. Oversight currently spread across 22 separate professional bodies will be consolidated into a new public-sector supervisor—the Financial Conduct Authority—in an effort to close regulatory loopholes and standardize enforcement across legal, accounting and financial sectors. The government says the change responds to longstanding concerns about weak enforcement, inconsistent oversight and gaps that have allowed corrupt or negligent practitioners to avoid scrutiny.
The strategy also pledges tougher enforcement tools, including expanded use of sanctions against professional facilitators, greater intelligence-sharing between the National Crime Agency, the Domestic Corruption Unit and regulators, and the use of artificial intelligence to detect complex networks of enablers.
The government frames the overhaul as essential to protecting national security, ensuring fair business competition and restoring public trust. In Parliament, the security minister said corruption “makes people in the U.K. poorer and less safe,” undermines confidence in institutions, damages the country’s reputation as a place to do business, distorts markets and deters investment.
Transparency International UK welcomed several elements of the plan, including the focus on insider corruption, stronger oversight of the legal and accounting sectors and the creation of new investigative capacity. But the group warned that the strategy still leaves key political-integrity issues unaddressed.
Daniel Bruce, chief executive of Transparency International UK, said the plan “acknowledges that restoring trust in government is ‘the great test of our era’ yet it fails to address the elephant in the room. The U.K. still lacks donation caps and reduced spending limits that would provide genuine insurance against the influence of big money in politics.”
“There is a lack of action on political integrity with the revolving door remaining effectively unenforced for ministers, and leaving Westminster woefully opaque compared to its international peers,” he added.
The strategy also sets out an international agenda, including efforts to strengthen beneficial-ownership transparency, counter illicit finance with global partners and host an international summit on corruption.
