Treasury committee to investigate economic crime

Parliament's Treasury committee has announced an inquiry into economic crime amid renewed concerns about money laundering and the security of consumers’ data.

The cross-party committee’s inquiry will look at the scale of money laundering, terrorist financing, sanctions and regulations. It will also review the threat to households from economic crime, whether financial companies do enough to combat such crime and how secure consumers’ data is.

Nicky Morgan, who chairs the committee, said: “Given the threats that face the UK, the effectiveness of the regimes that we use to protect our financial system from misuse have never been more important.

“It has been claimed that the UK, particularly the London property market, is becoming a destination of choice to launder the proceeds of overseas crime and corruption. The Treasury committee will examine the UK’s role in international efforts to tackle money laundering and terrorist financing and implement sanctions.”

The poisoning of two Russians in Salisbury has refocused attention on how willing UK institutions are to accept Russian money. Campaigning group Transparency International has calculated that £4.4bn of UK property was bought with suspicious wealth and that a quarter of those properties were bought by Russian individuals.

Morgan said her committee would also examine the potential for fraud, scams and data theft as consumers carry out banking and other financial matters online. Official figures estimate there were 3.2m fraud incidents in the year ending September 2017.

“As millions of customers are exposed to the risk of economic crime, we’ll scrutinise the response of the Treasury, its associated bodies and the regulators, and explore the role that consumer education can play,” Morgan said.