Here’s the introduction to his must-read opinion piece..
‘The UK is not remotely a corrupt country’ ……The prime minister said those words last week.
Clearly, we do not need to bribe judges or court officials, or indeed other public officials, for a desired outcome. According to Transparency International’s 2020 Corruption Perception Index, we sit at joint 11th in the world for being the least corrupt country. However, his comment followed allegations of influence bought in parliament, seats bought in the upper house, and misuse of public funds for private ends.
In a potential Venn diagram representing corruption in the UK, is there a circle containing lawyers which overlaps with a central corruption circle?
There were two stories last week which highlighted the dangers facing the legal profession.
In the first, the Centre for Public Data published new data and research on properties in England and Wales owned by individuals based overseas.
Nearly 1% of all registered titles in England and Wales are now registered to individuals with an overseas correspondence address. This has more than doubled since 2010, when such individuals owned around 0.4% of titles. Three-quarters of the titles are registered to individuals with addresses in just 20 countries, with the main groups being the Crown dependencies and British Overseas Territories (Jersey, Guernsey, Isle of Man and the British Virgin Islands), South-East Asia and the Middle East, and English-speaking countries. The British Virgin Islands has featured heavily in the news recently – see below for more.
You can draw your own conclusions about why these properties were bought. However, the data chimes in with the most recent 2020 National Risk Assessment report which said that it is ‘likely that thousands of properties in London have been bought with illicit funds over the years and that hundreds of millions are laundered through conveyancing across the UK’.
