?Using lawyers to beat the law? was the theme of a seminar on money laundering and terrorism financing organised by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) last week. The lecture was delivered by visiting expert Collingwood Thompson who has wide experience in advising on prosecution in white-collar crime cases.

Lately the legal profession has come under pressure to show greater adherence to their responsibilities as gatekeepers with regards to financial crime. Lawyers, it has been found elsewhere, are often used by money launderers to act as screens in devious transactions. Government will soon introduce new measures to ensure that notaries, attorneys and barristers adhere to the highest professional standards and do not fall prey to their crooked clients.

Counter-laundering measures initially focused on the financial system through which smugglers, drug and arms traffickers, recipients of bribe money and the like get their dirty funds cleaned up. Banks, insurance companies, moneychangers and stockbrokers have been required to set up systems to spot and report movement of filthy money. Later, other trades like real estate were included in the list of potential front-cash operations that transform and channel receipts of criminal activities into the legitimate mainstream of the economy.

Banks in Mauritius and across the world have been investing massively to acquire the latest technology and methodologies that monitor attempts to launder money or fund terrorist activities. Criminals are now on the look-out for new interfaces. And lawyers fit the bill prefectly.

Beyond suspicion

Lawyers are increasingly acting as contact points with financial institutions on behalf of their clients who manage never to show themselves up. More often than not, transactions carried out through members of the legal professions are considered beyond suspicion. Unlawful operations across borders are even harder to detect, especially if the practitioners choose to adopt an offhand attitude towards their foreign clients and contacts.

What follows is a scenario where the crime has every chance of going undetected. A drug trafficker in Colombia gives his lawyer based in Panama ? a country where confidentiality of information is sacrosanct - the power of attorney to transact on his behalf in foreign jurisdictions. The Panamanian attorney transfers money to be deposited in a bank account in Mauritius through a Mauritian lawyer. The Mauritian bank accepts the deposits as he has no reason whatsoever not to trust the local attorney. The latter, on the other hand, assumes that his Panamanian counterpart has acted professionally. Drug money has thus become perfectly clean.

Soon members of the law professions in Mauritius will have to comply with disclosure standards. They will be required to report any of their clients? suspicious transactions to the FIU, the police or any other investigative agencies. This implies a total culture change in the professions involved. The FIU seminar was an opportunity to impart the necessary tools and knowledge to professionals who often have to take on fiduciary and other responsibilities on behalf of other people.