London Daily

Focus on the big picture.
Wednesday, Oct 15, 2025

Lawyers, accountants and others play key role in financial crime

Lawyers, accountants and others play key role in financial crime

A powerful international organization whose members represent the world’s largest economies has issued a strong warning about the “threats and risks” posed by lawyers, accountants and other facilitators who help their clients commit and conceal financial crimes.

These “professional enablers,” often associated with the secretive offshore finance industry, “undermine not only the rule of law, but their own profession,” says the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in a new report. While it stops short of concrete prescriptions, the report includes broad recommendations aimed at “targeting professional enablers and disrupting their activities.”

The “Ending the Shell Game” report, which cites reporting by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in its opening paragraph, marks the OECD’s first detailed foray into the realm of criminal professional enablers, a wide term that encompasses a potpourri of whizzes with special skills, including tax advisers, wealth managers, lawyers, accountants, company formation agents and trust companies. Many of the OECD’s 37 member countries, including the United States, the Netherlands and Switzerland are home to hoards of professional enablers and have poor track records in holding the various sectors accountable.

Recommendations for countries include more education about the role of enablers in financial crime and tougher laws to hold them criminally liable. Where lawyers can too easily hide behind client-attorney privilege and refuse to share possible evidence of crime with law enforcement, for example, the OECD suggests that countries consider new legislation.

All countries, the OECD suggests, should create national strategies “to tackle professional enablers who actively participate in tax crimes and other financial crimes.”

The report takes pains to distinguish those complicit in moving and hiding illicit money from professionals who follow the law.

“The majority of professionals are law-abiding and play an important role in assisting businesses and individuals to understand and comply with the law and helping the financial system run smoothly,” the report says. “Such law-abiding professionals are to be differentiated from a small set of professionals who use their skills and knowledge of the law to actively promote, market and facilitate the commission of crimes by their clients.

Professional enablers in the shadows


Poor and wealthy countries alike are under growing pressure to recoup billions of dollars in revenue lost to tax evasion and crack down on financial crime. Tax advisers, lawyers and accountants are valuable partners for rogue actors who need sophisticated structures and clever advice to outsmart law enforcement.

Dr. Katie Benson, a lecturer at Lancaster University Law School who has written extensively on the topic, said that interest in enablers has spiked over recent years. “Increasingly, there is more of a focus on sanctioning people for doing this,” Benson said. “There is a concern that it doesn’t happen enough.”

The OECD’s report highlights examples from around the world of professionals hiding clients’ money, often through shell companies whose owners are hard to trace. In one U.S. case cited in the report, tax advisors prepared fake business losses on tax returns to reduce taxes paid. In another from Sweden and the United Kingdom, the OECD described an incident where an unnamed offshore specialist encouraged customers to communicate through encrypted emails and changed banks to avoid detection by police.

Newsletter

Related Articles

0:00
0:00
Close
French PM Suspends Macron’s Pension Reform Until After 2027 in Bid to Stabilize Government
Orange, Bouygues and Free Make €17 Billion Bid for Drahi’s Altice France Telecom Assets
Dutch Government Seizes Chipmaker After U.S. Presses for Removal of Chinese CEO
Bessent Accuses China of Dragging Down Global Economy Amid New Trade Curbs
U.S. Revokes Visas of Foreign Nationals Who ‘Celebrated’ Charlie Kirk’s Assassination
AI and Cybersecurity at Forefront as GITEX Global 2025 Kicks Off in Dubai
DJI Loses Appeal to Remove Pentagon’s ‘Chinese Military Company’ Label
EU Deploys New Biometric Entry/Exit System: What Non-EU Travelers Must Know
Australian Prime Minister’s Private Number Exposed Through AI Contact Scraper
Ex-Microsoft Engineer Confirms Famous Windows XP Key Was Leaked Corporate License, Not a Hack
China’s lesson for the US: it takes more than chips to win the AI race
Australia Faces Demographic Risk as Fertility Falls to Record Low
California County Reinstates Mask Mandate in Health Facilities as Respiratory Illness Risk Rises
Israel and Hamas Agree to First Phase of Trump-Brokered Gaza Truce, Hostages to Be Freed
French Political Turmoil Elevates Marine Le Pen as Rassemblement National Poised for Power
China Unveils Sweeping Rare Earth Export Controls to Shield ‘National Security’
The Davos Set in Decline: Why the World Economic Forum’s Power Must Be Challenged
France: Less Than a Month After His Appointment, the New French Prime Minister Resigns
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that Hungary will not adopt the euro because the European Union is falling apart.
Sarah Mullally Becomes First Woman Appointed Archbishop of Canterbury
Mayor in western Germany in intensive care after stabbing
Australian government pays Deloitte nearly half a million dollars for a report built on fabricated quotes, fake citations, and AI-generated nonsense.
US Prosecutors Gained Legal Approval to Hack Telegram Servers
Macron Faces Intensifying Pressure to Resign or Trigger New Elections Amid France’s Political Turmoil
Standard Chartered Names Roberto Hoornweg as Sole Head of Corporate & Investment Banking
UK Asylum Housing Firm Faces Backlash Over £187 Million Profits and Poor Living Conditions
UK Police Crack Major Gang in Smuggling of up to 40,000 Stolen Phones to China
BYD’s UK Sales Soar Nearly Nine-Fold, Making Britain Its Biggest Market Outside China
Trump Proposes Farm Bailout from Tariff Revenues Amid Backlash from Other Industries
FIFA Accuses Malaysia of Forging Citizenship Documents, Suspends Seven Footballers
Latvia to Bar Tourist and Occasional Buses to Russia and Belarus Until 2026
A Dollar Coin Featuring Trump’s Portrait Expected to Be Issued Next Year
Australia Orders X to Block Murder Videos, Citing Online Safety and Public Exposure
Three Scientists Awarded Nobel Prize in Medicine for Discovery of Immune Self-Tolerance Mechanism
OpenAI and AMD Forge Landmark AI-Chip Alliance with Equity Option
Munich Airport Reopens After Second Drone Shutdown
France Names New Government Amid Political Crisis
Trump Stands Firm in Shutdown Showdown and Declares War on Drug Cartels — Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Surge of U.S. Billionaires Transforms London’s Peninsula Apartments into Ultra-Luxury Stronghold
Pro Europe and Anti-War Babiš Poised to Return to Power After Czech Parliamentary Vote
Jeff Bezos Calls AI Surge a ‘Good’ Bubble, Urges Focus on Lasting Innovation
Japan’s Ruling Party Chooses Sanae Takaichi, Clearing Path to First Female Prime Minister
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sentenced to Fifty Months in Prison Following Prostitution Conviction
Taylor Swift’s ‘Showgirl’ Launch Extends Billion-Dollar Empire
Trump Administration Launches “TrumpRx” Plan to Enable Direct Drug Sales at Deep Discounts
Trump Announces Intention to Impose 100 Percent Tariff on Foreign-Made Films
Altman Says GPT-5 Already Outpaces Him, Warns AI Could Automate 40% of Work
Singapore and Hong Kong Vie to Dominate Asia’s Rising Gold Trade
Trump Organization Teams with Saudi Developer on $1 Billion Trump Plaza in Jeddah
Manhattan Sees Surge in Office-to-Housing Conversions, Highest Since 2008
×