Symposium – in conversation with the professionals

Money launderers may be hard to track down but it takes not dissimilar tenacity to coordinate diaries with the leading financial crime lawyers and AML consultants. MLB persevered to good purpose as the following dialogue over lunch with Monty Raphael, senior partner at Peters and Peters, and Cliff Knuckey, MD of RISC Global, the anti-money laundering consultancy, and recently retired head of Scotland Yard’s Money Laundering Investigation Team, reveals. Timon Molloy, MLB’s editor, chipped in occasionally.

Cliff Knuckey may be reached on tel: +44 (0) 20 7291 5722; email: cknuckey@riscglobal.com, website: www.riscglobal.com. Monty Raphael may be contacted on tel: +44 (0) 20 7629 7991; email: montyr@petersandpeters.co.uk, website: www.petersandpeters.co.uk

“A lot of MLROs think they’re capable of giving their own training but often they’re poorly qualified to do so. They lack the necessary skills, fail to get the messages across and so put staff at risk,” warned Cliff Knuckey. But even the most advanced training cannot prove definitive for employees or even MLROs in some situations:“Views differ, for example, on whether the nominated officer should give feedback internally when an internal disclosure has been made,” noted Monty Raphael. MLROs were inclined to panic, he said, about tipping off and prejudicing an investigation (offences under the UK Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 ): “They tend to ring-fence the matter and give as little feedback as possible. I advise the MLRO to say, ‘You did well to report it to me.’”There really should be no justification to “leap-frog” the nominated officer, observed Mr Raphael, unless the staff member suspects that the MLRO himself is an accomplice of the target parties or is grossly negligent in the performance of his duties.“If an employee goes over the head of the MLRO he’s at risk of committing an act of gross misconduct by not following company procedure,” he noted. In any subsequent action for wrongful dismissal a court might not accept that his course was justified on overriding public policy grounds. “It’s a question of management, in the way the MLRO processes the report and feeds back so that he puts the employee’s mind at rest,” said Mr Knuckey. “Does, the staff member accept, for example, that the MLRO has access to information that he himself does not?” “I agree,” said Mr Raphael. “In the case of a clearing bank, which receives somewhere between, say, 100 and 300 reports per week there is a potentially huge time management problem in feeding back on each case, notwithstanding that a proportion are machine-generated alerts.” He argued that the solution lies in appropriate training: “It’s all about the culture. Staff have to trust that the legislation is there to protect them and that the MLRO has responsibilities that they don’t have, but that they’re protected once they’ve made a report.”