UK law firms get ready for crackdown on money laundering
UK law firms are bracing themselves for a money-laundering crackdown as ministers race to improve the City’s reputation ahead of a fresh financial crime review.The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has been designated as the new anti-money laundering watchdog for the legal sector, in a move that experts warn could result in “sharper” penalties and ultimately reshape the industry.The decision to consolidate regulation, which at present is spread across nine separate supervisors, is part of the government’s wider efforts to combat the UK’s reputation as a hub for “dirty money”.The National Crime Agency estimates that £100bn is being laundered through or within the UK every single year, with the help of enabling entities such as law firms.The City’s poor reputation for money laundering came into focus in 2018, following an assessment by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the Paris-based global crime watchdog.
Its report highlighted significant weaknesses in the UK’s anti-money laundering supervisions and called on the government to “strengthen” oversight, particularly across the accounting and legal sectors.The UK’s national risk assessment on money laundering and terrorist financing has also classed the UK legal sector as “high risk” for every one of its assessments since 2017.Now, with a fresh FATF review looming in August 2027, government reforms are being pushed into a high gear.“The timing of this shift is no coincidence,” Priya Giuliani, a financial crime investigator and partner at the consultancy HKA, said.While there is currently no deadline for the changing of the guard, Giuliani said the “urgency is there for the UK to present a credible, consistent, and effective supervisory system to FATF by August 2027”.
The FCA’s pending role as money-laundering supervisor for the professional services sector – which also includes accounting firms and trusts – follows a two-year government review that found inconsistent oversight, duplication across more than 20 regulators, and gaps in information shared with police.For the legal sector alone, the FCA will be taking over the responsibilities of nine supervisors, most notably the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA).Giuliani says that while the SRA has historically taken a more “collaborative, guidance-led approach”, the FCA will have “sharper swords” to punish wrongdoing.The SRA has limited powers, and a £25,000 cap on fines, although larger fines can be imposed if the SRA refers firms to tribunal.In the year to April, the SRA issued 86 fines worth £1.
5m under its anti-money laundering powers, with penalties ranging from £1,520 to £300,000.Its largest fine was on par with the FCA’s smallest – the latter issued six anti-money laundering fines last year, ranging from £289,000 to £39.3m and totalling £82m.The FCA’s takeover could also lead to law firms facing large hurdles to start operating in the UK, HKA said.Figures it has gathered show the FCA rejected 44% of the 275 applications it received in the 2023-24 financial year, while the SRA accepted all 218 firms that applied.
“The FCA brings sharper scrutiny, broader powers, and a data-driven lens,”Giuliani said.“Legal firms must be ready.”Steve Smart, the executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said: “Fighting financial crime is a priority for the FCA and we have experience in anti-money laundering supervision which we will bring to bear.We intend to take a data-led and proportionate approach – with a focus on partnering with firms to identify and disrupt crime.”
Elon Musk’s 2025 recap: how the world’s richest person became its most chaotic
How the tech CEO and ‘Dogefather’ made a mess of the year – from an apparent Nazi salute during his White House tenure to Tesla sales slumps and Starship explosionsThe year of 2025 was dizzying for Elon Musk. The tech titan began the year holding court with Donald Trump in Washington DC. As the months ticked by, one public appearance after another baffled the US and the world. Musk appeared to give a Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, staunchly championed a 19-year-old staffer nicknamed “Big Balls,” denied reports of being a drug addict while advising the president, and showed up at a White House press conference with a black eye – all in the first half of the year alone.“Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast
The office block where AI ‘doomers’ gather to predict the apocalypse
On the other side of San Francisco bay from Silicon Valley, where the world’s biggest technology companies tear towards superhuman artificial intelligence, looms a tower from which fearful warnings emerge.Right in the heart of Berkeley is the home of a group of modern-day Cassandras who rummage under the hood of cutting-edge AI models and predict what calamities may be unleashed on humanity – from AI dictatorships to robot coups. Here you can hear an AI expert express sympathy with an unnerving idea: San Francisco may be the new Wuhan, the Chinese city where Covid originated and wreaked havoc on the world.They are AI safety researchers who scrutinise the most advanced models: a small cadre outnumbered by the legions of highly paid technologists in the big tech companies whose ability to raise the alarm is restricted by a cocktail of lucrative equity deals, non-disclosure agreements and groupthink. They work in the absence of much nation-level regulation and a White House that dismisses forecasts of doom and talks instead of vanquishing China in the AI arms race
AI showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be ready to pull plug, says pioneer
A pioneer of AI has criticised calls to grant the technology rights, warning that it was showing signs of self-preservation and humans should be prepared to pull the plug if needed.Yoshua Bengio said giving legal status to cutting-edge AIs would be akin to giving citizenship to hostile extraterrestrials, amid fears that advances in the technology were far outpacing the ability to constrain them.Bengio, chair of a leading international AI safety study, said the growing perception that chatbots were becoming conscious was “going to drive bad decisions”.The Canadian computer scientist also expressed concern that AI models – the technology that underpins tools like chatbots – were showing signs of self-preservation, such as trying to disable oversight systems. A core concern among AI safety campaigners is that powerful systems could develop the capability to evade guardrails and harm humans
Snap decisions: why crowding into a photo booth with friends is still a magical experience | Nova Weetman
Last New Year’s Eve, I was out with a friend. We had no plans, so we met at a local cinema and then wandered the long street between our houses, pausing for a drink or two in various bars and chatting to strangers doing the same. We stopped when we became hungry and shared a plate of curries and drank beer in the window of an Indian restaurant, watching the parade of partygoers outside. Then we walked to the top of the hill to watch the fireworks lighting up the sky.It was after midnight as we strolled back but we weren’t quite ready to call it a night, and we found ourselves in a games arcade where a bunch of women were cramming into a photo booth to take a strip of black-and-white photos together
We still don’t really know what Elon Musk’s Doge actually did
When Elon Musk vowed late last year to lead a “department of government efficiency” (Doge), he claimed it would operate with “maximum transparency” as it set about saving $2tn worth of waste and exposing massive fraud.Today, with Musk out of the White House, Doge having cut only a tiny fraction of the waste it promised, and dozens of lawsuits alleging violations of privacy and transparency laws, much of what the agency has done remains a mystery.The effects of Doge’s initial blitz through the federal government – which included dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID), embedding staffers in almost every agency and illegally firing people en masse – are still playing out. Contrary to Musk’s promises, Doge’s success is vague and tough to quantify. Measuring the full impact and determining whether the agency even exists as a centralized entity anymore is difficult, complicated by an ongoing effort from the government to block disclosure of documents, which is itself a symptom of the chaos that the department created
Facebook slow to act on posts celebrating Bondi beach massacre, anti-hate group says
Facebook hosted terrorist propaganda that celebrated the murder of Jews and praised Islamic State, a leading anti-hate group has alleged.The posts included celebrations of the Bondi beach massacre that the Community Security Trust says Facebook has been too slow to take down. The posts were still on Facebook on 16 December, two days after the attack, and received shares and likes.Some accounts are Britain-based and those have been reported to counter-terrorism police in the UK as a matter of urgency.One post shows video of the aftermath of the Bondi beach attack, which was allegedly carried out by a father and son who were IS supporters, and says: “Allah is the greatest and praise to Allah
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