A synopsis of panel session 2, which takes place on 5 October at ICLR Singapore, kindly provided by the session’s moderator, Ellyn S. Rosen – Regulation and Global Initiatives Counsel, American Bar Association Center for Professional Responsibility. Conference materials will be made available to ICLR.net members after the conference.
During the first day of the Conference, this panel will focus on terrorist finance and anti-money laundering (AML) issues facing regulators of the legal profession. Moderator Ellyn Rosen, Regulation and Global Initiatives Counsel at the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility will be joined by Dr. Heike Lörcher, Head of Office from the German Federal Bar; Crispin Passmore, Executive Director for Policy at the Solicitors Regulation Authority; Deborah Armour, Chief Legal Officer at the Law Society of British Columbia; and Surenthiraraj s/o Saunthararajah, a partner with Eversheds Harry Elias LLP in Singapore.
In its mutual evaluation reports, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has raised concerns in the U.S., Canada, Europe, the U.K., and elsewhere that the legal profession, regulators in particular, are not doing enough to prevent money-laundering or terrorist financing or to prosecute lawyers for their participation in it. Instead, the FATF has intimated, the profession is enabling such behavior, in part through lack of effective regulation. Notable is the lack of hard data in the mutual evaluation reports to support such allegations. This panel provides an optimal forum for regulators to discuss this topic, including where there exist commonalities in pressures on regulators by the FATF, the extent to which complaints about these issues are coming to regulators’ attention (including from other government agencies), and what role regulators can and should take in better educating themselves and the profession about AML. The discussion will also focus on what the international lawyer regulator community can do, collectively, to put ourselves in a stronger position collectively with regard to communicating with and addressing concerns of the FATF.