White-Collar Crime and Its Future, With Lee Adams
‘Every degree of business has its invitation to do evil.’
Daniel Defoe
(1660 - 1731)
Across England and Wales in 2019 the Crime Survey reported that incidents of fraud had increased by 15% and estimates indicate the UK is losing around £190 Billion per year to fraud. With London being the second largest financial hub of the world it naturally see’s its fair share of white-collar malfeasance, an issue, it seems, that’s only going to get worse.
Lee Adams is a Managing Partner at leading law firm JMW Solicitors who specialises in Business Crime and heads up their London office. Throughout his career he’s sat on both sides of the table, from Defender to Prosecutor. Lee now represents individuals in serious and complex litigation and thanks to his experience on the defence side he’s very familiar with all the loopholes available when prosecuting.
Lee Adams - Managing Partner at JMW Solicitors in London
What are the most common types of business crime you see?
Bogus investment funds which are fronted by very convincing fund managers who have an air of legitimacy about them, often because they are well educated and move in the right circles or have spent some time with genuine investment funds so they can talk the talk. Those sorts of characters can be very convincing but once you have invested your chances of ever seeing a return are negligible. I also often come across businesses which have had enormous amounts of money stolen by key employees such as their financial directors who have the inside knowledge to subvert the usual security protocols.
Has the problem got worse with advancements in technology?
Advancements in technology have made it a lot harder for people to detect whether a transaction feels wrong. Technology also means that fraudsters can build up sophisticated levels of misinformation around themselves to build their own profiles, as well as mining information about their victims, all without ever having to meet someone face to face.
What can be done to alleviate these problems?
There is no substitute for having an experienced advisor to call upon to sense check a situation, whether someone is thinking of making an investment in a new venture or whether they suspect something is going wrong in their existing business.
How do you see the landscape changing in this sector over the coming years?
The expertise to prosecute fraud is increasingly shifting from the government agencies to the private sector. Private firms are just better resourced and more in control of the cases they take on, which means quicker and more effective results for clients over government agencies like the police and the Crown Prosecution Service.
At what position do people need to contact the likes of yourself?
Experts like me are problem solvers who have seen hundreds or even thousands of different scenarios. Whenever a sense check is needed it’s worth having a preliminary conversation with an expert.
There’s a popular assumption that the punishments for white-collar crimes aren’t particularly harsh, is this true?
That used to be the case. I once represented a defendant who cheated the government out of £14m in a VAT fraud. He received four years imprisonment and was out in two. Nowadays he would likely receive 10 years in prison.
What implications are there as a result of the changes to white-collar and financial crime enforcement brought about by Brexit?
White collar and financial crime often crosses the borders of several countries as the fraudsters perpetrate the fraud and move the proceeds. Post-Brexit cooperation between different countries has gone backwards 30 years. The challenge of prosecuting cross-border cases is bigger than ever. That is why it is important to have a network of friendly law firms across Europe and indeed the world, which we do.
