Making development assistance work at home: DfID’s approach to clamping down on international bribery and money laundering in the UK

Corruption will remain a profitable crime in developing countries as long as counterparts in rich countries are willing to hide stolen resources. Therefore, the UK Department for International Development (DfID) is funding a project to increase investigations on money laundered by senior political figures in the UK.

The current paper demonstrates that the DfID’s project has fared well, either in terms of the restrained amounts of money, or in terms of the disruptive impact on mechanisms that enable illicit outflows.

Lessons learned contain:

• the police agencies in the UK need to coordinate intelligence better in order to be strategic about decisions on which cases to follow up
• the financial industry lacks incentive to conduct proper Know Your Costumer (KYC) procedures
• the deeper illicit money circulates into financial markets, the more complicated it is to trace and recover it

• there is a need to enhance knowledge sharing on money laundering among relevant actors, improve the follow up on suspicious activity reports (SARs) and use different sources of information in cases of investigation
• in addition, there is a need to expand the data gathering to areas outside of the UK
• better integration is required between the work at the developing country level and efforts in the UK
• developing countries’ banking regulatory systems could be assisted to better monitor their own financial centers to avoid outflows of illicit money to start with