Financial Crime: A London (Bar) Overview

A Boom Time for the Sector

The last year has seen transformative developments in financial crime. The rate of change, in force and in prospect, means that this is a boom time for many lawyers in the sector. Legislative reforms that fundamentally reshape corporate liability, a National Risk Assessment that turns the headlights on coming criminal threats, proposed reform to serious fraud trials and a landmark Supreme Court judgment on market manipulation are some of the points to cover.

The breadth of work is astonishing, and this is reflected in the variety of bodies who regulate and prosecute financial crime. The FCA, HMRC, the Insolvency Service and CPS SEOCID now form the backbone of cases that are coming to trial, and practitioners need to be adept in the range of challenges that this creates. After its first-ever DPA, the CPS has authorised charges against 11 individuals in the Entain investigation. The SFO has upped the pace with an active workload of 130 cases and several new investigations and charges announced this year. Failure to prevent bribery is included among them. The Office has five trials coming before the courts in 2026.

We believe that the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) will, in future years, be seen as the vanguard of the revolution in financial crime. Litigators have understandably focused on two main changes:

• Sections 196-199 ECCTA: The expanded identification doctrine sweeps away the directing mind and will test and replaces it with a much broader test of a senior manager acting within their actual or apparent authority.
• Sections 199-206 ECCTA: The failure to prevent fraud offence came into force on 1 September 2025. In outline, the offence imposes criminal liability on large organisations that meet two of the three criteria defined by the Act (more than 250 employees, GBP36 million turnover, or GBP18 million in total assets), where an associated person commits a fraud or other economic crime intending to benefit the organisation and the organisation lacked reasonable fraud prevention procedures. Organisations will be held to account for the dishonesty of their employees, agents and other “associated persons”. The offence is aimed at “large” organisations, although the qualifying criteria will undoubtedly catch many bodies that regard themselves as “medium-sized”. For the purposes of the offence, liability includes, but is not limited to, incorporation by the Companies Act 2006, Royal Charter, statute (for example, NHS trusts), partnerships, including LLPs and co-operative and community benefit societies.

And, just when you thought it was safe to go back into the office, provisions in the Crime and Policing Bill 2025 (CPB), which is currently in its second reading in the Lords, seek to widen organisational liability for any crime committed by a senior manager within the scope of their actual or apparent authority (Section 196 CPB).

Eye-catching as the boundaries are, a more practical means of predicting the future is to look back and see how these changes have come about. We suggest the ECCTA and CPB are the full-grown heirs to the regimes birthed by the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and the Bribery Act 2010. The statutory defence to failure to report fraud is one example; however, the reasonableness or otherwise of the procedures that an organisation had in place to prevent fraud can only be resolved by a court in a case-specific context. This area of practice has been described as “the golden age of compliance”. Following the introduction of the ECCTA, that description needs updating to “the golden age of compliance… or else”.

The National Risk Assessment of Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing 2025 (the first NRA since 2020) landed with a thump on 17 July 2025. HM Treasury and the Home Office are deadly serious about enforcing the regulatory regime against corporates, and it is easy to see why. The report leads (paragraph 3.8) with the following statistics: “Fraud is the most commonly experienced crime in the UK, accounting for over 43% of crime in England and Wales, with an estimated 4.1 million fraud incidents in the year ending December 2024, a 33% increase compared with December 2023.”

The NRA 2025 identifies where all this fraud is coming from. The three main sources are terrorist financing, organised crime and kleptocracy/sanctions. Crypto-asset service providers and electronic money institutions are reclassified from medium to high risk. Over 120,000 organisations fall within the current AML regime. The fact that they are regulated and policed by a variety of organisations is part of the response to the diverse nature of modern financial crime. In major forthcoming fraud trials or asset forfeiture proceedings, it is certain that the individuals in suits sitting behind the prosecution team will also be drawn from the Counter Terrorism Command, the National Crime Agency and the Financial Intelligence Unit as part of the government’s response to these present and emerging threats.

Sir Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts (Part I) was published on 18 June 2025. Chapter 9 proposes that a judge should be able to direct a trial without a jury in certain fraud cases. The report (at paragraph 89) suggests two bases for determining which fraud trials might be eligible for judicial direction. Basis 1 applies to frauds in which (i) the dishonesty is not immediately obvious; (ii) the area of business lies outside the understanding of the general public; and (iii) the defendant is an expert in their field. Economic crimes listed in Schedule 11 ECCTA, which the judge determines to be serious or complex, form basis 2. Schedule 11 catches a very wide range of offences.

The nod to the ECCTA is on trend but the evidence to justify the change could be better classified as archaeological. The report cites the Blue Arrow trial (1991) and the Jubilee Line trial (2003) as justifications for reform. Most practitioners will know that there has been much progress towards trial efficiency since then. Moreover, if the proposal is enacted, it is unlikely to reduce the burden of work as, in addition to the difficulties defining the category of eligibility, Sir Brian believes that any decision should have a full right of interlocutory appeal.

Faith in judicial decision-making in serious fraud trials – and appeals – also took a heavy knock when Tom Hayes and Carlo Palombo won their appeals against the SFO in the Supreme Court on 23 July 2025. The Court held that dishonesty cannot be presumed from commercial conduct alone, emphasising (in the market context) that whether an act was genuine or honest depends on the actor’s state of mind. This was, or should have been, a question of fact for the jury. No one is perfect, least of all fraud practitioners or fraud judges, but it is sobering to reflect that this important issue, regarding the interpretation of dishonest conduct, took until 2025 to resolve. The case is a further illustration that the complexity and rewards of practice in financial crime will grow but that the future for nimble lawyers could hardly be brighter. This section of the Directory celebrates those leading practitioners across London and the circuits who defend and prosecute financial and corporate crime.