INTRODUCTION Contributed by: Aziz Rahman, Rahman Ravelli Solicitors
those in business – obligations that can carry severe penalties for those who fail to meet them. In March 2022, the UK’s Economic Crime (Transpar - ency and Enforcement) Act 2017 was amended to enable the Office of Financial Sanctions Implementa - tion (OFSI) to operate on a strict liability basis, mean - ing it can now penalise companies and individuals for sanctions breaches they may not know they have committed. It is a move towards a US-style enforce - ment model and comes at a time when there is clos - er co-operation between authorities worldwide and increased use of intelligence sources in relation to sanctions enforcement. This trend of stricter sanctions enforcement as a criti - cal component of white-collar crime prosecution can - not be ignored. An indicator of this is the European Union’s harmonisation of sanctions evasion as a crimi - nal offence across all member states in May 2024. Sanctions enforcement is picking up across the bloc. Cybercrime and cryptocurrency The rapid evolution of digital assets has, to some degree, redrawn the white-collar crime map, creat - ing new issues and frontiers. Nations are having to acknowledge and try to manage the rapid rise in cryp - tocurrency-related fraud, the complexities of asset recovery and the difficulties of policing what amounts to a borderless digital world. This has led to a string of landmark rulings in the UK, on issues including cryptocurrency being recognised as property, the location of cryptocurrency in rela - tion to the court’s jurisdiction, and crypto exchanges’ obligations to identify those involved in crypto-related wrongdoing. The precedents they set are both signifi - cant and far-reaching. In addition, recent times have seen increased enforce - ment action by the United States Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). One example was the 2024 jailing for 25 years of Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of failed crypto exchange FTX, for defrauding customers and inves - tors. Although the return of Donald Trump as president has led to the US taking a more lenient approach to cryptocurrency, the 2025 passing of the Genius Act
is the US’ first national cryptocurrency legislation and formal recognition of the crypto sector’s legitimacy. Recent years have seen the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) taking increasing action in relation to crypto. This may be due to the FCA benefitting from an increase in staffing and operating costs – and the fact that it has only been the UK regulator for crypto marketing since October 2023. But the FCA’s added strength can be seen as an indicator of crypto coming under closer scrutiny – as shown by the first convic - tion for operating illegal cryptocurrency ATMs. International harmonisation and co-operation As business has become increasingly global, white- collar crime has also evolved to be more international in nature. This, in turn, has prompted greater co-oper - ation between states. A number of high-profile cases have illustrated the extent to which agencies in various nations are now working more closely together than ever before in an attempt to achieve an outcome. One example would be the Airbus case. This saw the UK’s Serious Fraud Office working alongside the United States Depart - ment of Justice and Department of State and France’s Parquet National Financier to resolve bribery charges with the aircraft manufacturer. It led to Airbus agreeing in 2020 to pay more than USD3.9 billion in penalties. In addition, laws relating to white-collar crime are becoming more aligned, due in part to the influence of bodies such as the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and the Financial Action Task Force, which function on the basis of international co-operation. Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) DPAs are becoming part of more countries’ legal systems as the authorities recognise the benefits of taking a co-operative – rather than purely combative – approach to enforcement. While the US has had DPAs since the 1990s and the UK introduced them under the provisions of Schedule 17 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, other states are now following suit. France concluded its first DPA (known as a CJIP) in 2017. The same year saw Sin - gapore pass the Criminal Justice Act, which created
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