Michael Levi (UK)
Professor of Criminology, Cardiff University
SUMMARY:
Financial crime cannot survive without the help of legal service providers who facilitate and enable the legalization and management of illicit funds. This presentation focuses on the experience of the UK. By pointing to some notorious cases of illicit investments´ facilitation in UK, the systemic problem of enablers is showcased. The presentation analyses what has gone wrong in the UK, and why, and gives a brief overview of what has been currently done to fix the system. The lesson to be learned is that foreign direct investment may bring along unintended consequenses that need to be well understood to avoid damage that it may cause.
MICHAEL LEVI BIO:
Michael Levi has been Professor of Criminology at Cardiff since 1991. His main work has been making sense of the linkages and differences between white-collar and organised crime and their public and private sector controls, intersecting with fraud, corruption, money laundering and terrorism locally and transnationally. He has major lifetime and other research prizes from the British, European and American Societies of Criminology, the lifetime Tackling Economic Crime Award in the UK 2019, and the UNODC/Al Thani Corruption Research and Education prize 2020. His external honorary roles include membership of the Law Society’s Economic Crime Task Force, of the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime and of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. His current and recent projects include A Public Health Approach to Fraud (https://www.westmidlands-pcc.gov.uk/fraud/); Fraud and its relationship to Pandemics and Economic Crises from 1850 to the Present; the Impact of technologies on criminal markets and transnational organised crime; and cyber-enabled fraud and money laundering projects. He is a Senior Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and of RAND Europe.
See further, http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/people/view/38041-levi-michael