ABSTRACT
3.1 In recent years, the powers of the police and non-police organisations in the United Kingdom to investigate financial transactions, including money laundering, have grown enormously. Before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 virtually the only time that (outside of insolvency or companies investigations by the Department of Trade and Industry) banking information could lawfully be obtained in England and Wales was after they had charged a particular person with a crime. As early as 1986 and 1988—that is even before the Basel Declaration of Principles of 1988., the Council of Europe Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure and Confiscation of the Proceeds of Crime 1990 and the EC Directive on Money Laundering 1991—the English government had taken the initiative to make it a crime for bankers within the jurisdiction of the English courts 1 not to pass on their suspicions of drugs money laundering and had given bankers immunity from lawsuits if they chose to disclose their suspicions of non-drugs money laundering.
