The defendant agreed to help a friend named Harrington to hide some money for a period. Under the arrangement Harrington transferred around andpound;123,000 into the defendant’s bank account. The defendant used some of it to make some purchases for Harrington and, after an interval, he repaid the balance to Harrington less about andpound;5,000. The prosecution’s case was that the money represented proceeds of a fraud carried out by a bank official, who stole it from dormant accounts. The stolen money was laundered through a network of recipients, each of whom retained a small sum as payment for his services. The recipients included Harrington and the defendant. The defendant’s case was that he was approached by Harrington with a story that he was about to become involved in divorce proceedings, and that the defendant was asked to help Harrington to hide the money from Mrs Harrington (and the court), which he agreed to do. He denied any knowledge that the money had a criminal source.
Held:
Moore-Bick LJ said: ‘In our view the natural and ordinary meaning of section 328(1) is that the arrangement to which it refers must be one which relates to property which is criminal property at the time when the arrangement begins to operate on it. To say that it extends to property which was originally legitimate but became criminal only as a result of carrying out the arrangement is to stretch the language of the section beyond its proper limits. An arrangement relating to property which has an independent criminal object may, when carried out, render the subject matter criminal property, but it cannot properly be said that the arrangement applied to property that was already criminal property at the time it began to operate on it. Moreover, we do not accept that an arrangement of the kind under consideration in the present case can be separated into its component parts, each of which is then to be viewed as a separate arrangement. In this case there was but one arrangement, namely, that the appellant would receive money, hold it for a period and return it. To treat the holding and return as separate arrangements relating to property that had previously been received is artificial.’
Moore-Bick LJ added, obiter, that, on the assumption that the purpose for which the money was transferred to the defendant involved perverting the course of justice, it became criminal property in his hands on its receipt, and he could therefore have been charged with an offence of converting or transferring criminal property contrary to section 327 by returning most of it to Harrington, together with the goods which he had purchased with part of it.
Moore-Bick LJ, Rafferty DBE J, Gilbert QC HHJ
[2010] EWCA Crim 1925, [2011] 1 Cr App R 8, [2011] 1 WLR 1634, [2011] 1 Cr App Rep 8, [2010] Lloyd’s Rep FC 599
Bailii
Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 328(1)
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – GH, Regina v SC 22-Apr-2015
Appeal against conviction for entering into an arrangement for the retention of criminal funds. The defendant said that at the time of the arrangement there were not yet any criminal funds in existence. A had set up websites intending to con . .
Cited – G and Another, Regina v CACD 5-Dec-2013
The defendant had pled not guilty to a charge of entering into a facility which would facilitate money laundering. The court upheld that plea. The prosecutor now appealed.
Held: The appeal failed, although under section 328 it is not necessary . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Crime
Leading Case
Updated: 01 November 2021; Ref: scu.421215