Compliance & Regulation

UK Urges Private Schools to Help Crackdown on Money Laundering

Private schools in the UK have been urged to make sure wealthy parents are not using laundered money to pay for their children’s education, The Financial Times reported.

UK private schools are known for attracting the young people from the global elite, but the National Crime Agency (NCA) on Friday asked them to file more reports flagging fees suspected of being paid with dirty money.

The average fee in such schools is around USD22,500 a year per child and those institutions can be used by the corrupt around the globe for laundering their money and their reputation, the paper said.

“School and university fees have for a long time been a glaring loophole in the UK’s anti-money laundering system — fees can amount to hundreds of thousands of pounds, there are few if any checks and an increasing number of the students come from high-risk countries,” Robert Barrington, the executive director of Transparency International UK, told the paper.

One of Britain’s most prestigious and expensive schools, Millfield, was already used in 2011 for money laundering, according to The Guardian. A shell company, Valemont Properties, was used to pay a more than USD17,000 tuition fee for a Russian pupil. Valemont was mentioned in an OCCRP investigation into how influencia Russians shifted their dirty money abroad.

READ THE ARTICLE by occrp