Corporate vehicles and organised crime: concealing and managing illicit assets

Presenter: Professor Liz Campbell​

Organised crime groups make money through varied activities (e.g. trafficking, drugs, cyber-frauds, counterfeiting) and make use of licit corporate structures to conceal their illicit finances. Intervening with respect to such financial flows is central to prevention and disruption efforts.

In this paper, Professor Campbell analyses the laws and policies governing the existence and transparency of corporate vehicles and associated constructs across the UK, as well as the overarching EU framework. Campbell maps these legal and policy conditions and develops a framework for understanding which jurisdictions offer ideal/dissuasive features for organised crime groups (e.g. corporate secrecy, risks of detection) in order to facilitate the concealment, conversion and control of the proceeds of criminal enterprise. The application of policy and law is analysed to gain insights into the enforcement contexts and regulatory environments with a view to understanding the dynamics between the use of corporate vehicles for illicit purposes and variables influencing their regulation.

Professor Liz Campbell​ is chair of criminal law at Durham Law School, having held posts previously at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Aberdeen. 

Her research looks at the role of criminal law in responding to politicised social problems, and at how the politics of definition determines and affects these legal measures. Campbell uses this lens to explore laws on organised crime and corruption, the regulation of DNA databases, and the presumption of innocence. Her work has been published in leading journals such as the Modern Law Review, the British Journal of Criminology, Current Legal Problems, and the Criminal Law Review. Her monograph, Organised Crime and the Law, was published by Hart in 2013, following a Fulbright fellowship. 

Professor Campbell is currently funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to establish a network on corruption in commercial enterprise and by the Research Council UK to examine the use of corporate vehicles by transnational organised crime groups in the concealment, conversion and control of illicit finance.

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