Crime pays. But what is truly shocking is that criminal courts allow criminals they convict to keep the money. We know this because the FATF evaluates the effectiveness of countries at confiscating assets from criminals. There are four grades of ‘operational effectiveness’: high, substantial, moderate and low. Evaluations in the bottom half of the scale (that is, moderate or low effectiveness) indicate that ‘major’ or ‘fundamental’ improvements need to be made to law and practice. Eighty per cent of countries are in these grades. In other words, only 20% of countries bother with confiscation and, of them, just three out of 120 are ‘highly effective’ at confiscation.

We should clarify that this is 20% of countries evaluated, as opposed to 20% of the world by population. The top echelon includes large countries such as Russia, China and the USA. India has not yet been evaluated but we are prepared to stick our necks out and predict that they will score well in this category. Additionally, Western Europe is well represented: Italy, Spain and the UK have all scored well and we are also prepared to stick our necks out for France (still to be evaluated). The spread of countries in the top tier is uneven in other ways; several top tier countries are aligned for historical reasons with other countries. The effect of this is that when a country makes improvements that put it in the top tier, the aligned country picks up the improvements and enters the top tier as well. This seems to be the case with historically aligned countries such as Italy and San Marino; China, Taiwan and Hong Kong; the UK and Jamaica; and the USA and Israel. Notably this last pair are two of the three which attained the highest FATF grade, along with Honduras. The rest of the world, including much of that 20%, really do not do as much confiscation as they could.

Let us be crystal clear. Almost all people convicted in criminal courts worldwide keep the proceeds of their crimes. In 80% of countries the courts convict people of making money from crime and then allow them to keep the proceeds. Hardly any countries conduct financial investigations, and the wealthy leave court with their money intact.