Jersey’s White-Collar Crime Framework: An Expanding Arsenal, Seldom Deployed

Jersey’s framework to fight white-collar and financial crime

Jersey created a fully autonomous Financial Intelligence Unit in 2023, having previously operated as part of the Joint Financial Crimes Unit of the States of Jersey Police. It continues to expand its international links through the Egmont Group, and statutory gateways let the JFSC, the FIU and the States of Jersey Police share information rather than work from siloed pictures of the same risk. The primary target of that architecture is foreign predicate offending (bribery, corruption and fraud committed elsewhere and laundered through Jersey) rather than domestic money laundering, and the Proceeds of Crime (Jersey) Law 1999 (Proceeds of Crime Law) remains the principal weapon either way. Robustness, and being seen to be robust, matter equally. Trust in a finance centre is hard-earned and easily lost, which is as good a reason as any for the steady drumbeat of legislative activity that follows.

Recent legislative and regulatory developments

Several developments since the turn of the year show how quickly the framework keeps evolving.

The civil penalty cap question has been resolved
The JFSC’s civil financial penalty regime was widened to cover key persons and senior managers in 2022, and for a period the cap on penalties for negligent contraventions was removed altogether. That uncertainty ended on 12 March 2026, when the Financial Services Commission (Financial Penalties) (Jersey) Amendment Order reinstated maximum penalties for Bands 1, 2 and 2A. The same changes introduced, for the first time, an arrangement under which Government takes a share of JFSC fines, net of enforcement costs, with up to 30% applied to offset future regulatory fees for the relevant class of business. Whether that creates subtle pressure on an independent regulator to generate revenue, or instead makes it more cautious about imposing penalties at all, remains to be seen.

The AML/CFT/CPF Handbook has been overhauled  
The JFSC’s enhanced Handbook took effect on 31 May 2026, tightening expectations around complex structures, enhanced due diligence and criminal background checks for principal and key persons, giving effect to a MONEYVAL priority action. It will not sit still for long. The Money Laundering (Jersey) Amendment Order 2026, in force from 30 June, removes the blanket requirement to appoint a Money Laundering Compliance Officer in favour of a risk-based test tied to the size and risk profile of the business.

Beneficial ownership transparency has moved again too 
Jersey’s second consultation on ‘legitimate interest access’ to its central beneficial ownership register (a vetted, case-by-case route for those who can show a legitimate interest in tackling money laundering, terrorist financing or proliferation financing) closed on 30 January 2026, with Guernsey running a parallel consultation through to April. It is a deliberately limited proposal compared to the fully public register the certain UK voices continue to press the Crown Dependencies toward. Jersey’s maintains that unrestricted public access sits awkwardly with its obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. Feedback on the Jersey consultation is still awaited.

A competitiveness agenda continues to run alongside regulation and enforcement  
The Government’s Financial Services Competitiveness Programme published its final report and Ministerial Action Plan, ‘Time to Win’, in March 2026, alongside the JFSC’s own 2026–2030 Strategy. Both point toward streamlining Schedule 2 to the Proceeds of Crime Law, sharpening guidance on the use of reliance, and reviewing the role of the Money Laundering Compliance Officer; a more risk-based, proportionate perimeter, but, on the JFSC’s own account, no softening of its commitment to combat financial crime.

Company law changed too
The Companies (Jersey) Amendment No. 2 Law 2026, in force since 19 June, introduced a UK‑style corporate administration regime for the first time. This amended Article 155, which now names the JFSC, any supervisory body under the Proceeds of Crime (Supervisory Bodies) (Jersey) Law 2008, and the Minister for Treasury and Resources (acting on an economic substance failure) among those who may apply for a public‑interest winding up. This adds to the mechanisms available where corporate structures become part of the enforcement process.

Whistleblower protection: a missing piece, finally on the table

On 16 March 2026 the Minister for Social Security presented a draft Protected Disclosure (Protection of Whistleblowers) (Jersey) Law to the States Assembly for comment. The stated intention is for the draft Law to be formally debated by the new Assembly later this year, following the 7 June elections.

Jersey is, frankly, a late arrival. The UK, Ireland and the Isle of Man already have statutory whistleblowing regimes, while Guernsey, like Jersey until now, has none; an odd gap in a jurisdiction that otherwise polices firms closely.

The draft Law defines ‘wrongdoing’ broadly enough to capture money laundering and AML control failures, and the JFSC is one of nine named bodies to whom a disclosure may be made, providing for the first time a statutory, protected route to report suspected misconduct directly to the regulator.

Two gaps are worth flagging. A receiver (including the JFSC) must acknowledge, investigate and respond to a disclosure, but faces no penalty for simply failing to. Furthermore, compensation for a successful claim is capped at £30,000 in total, a figure carried across from discrimination legislation rather than calibrated to what a financial services whistleblower might actually be giving up. This is in stark contrast to the UK which imposes no equivalent cap.

Enforcement in practice: money laundering control failures

Two of the more significant prosecutions to date, both under Article 37(4) of the Proceeds of Crime Law, concerned not proven money laundering but failures of systems and controls.

In AG v Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank PJSC, Jersey Branch [2020] JRC 059, the Bank was fined £475,000 (plus £25,000 costs) for failing to maintain customer due diligence and risk assessment procedures, contrary to Article 11(1)(a) and (f) of the Money Laundering (Jersey) Order 2008. Over nearly six years, from 29 July 2013 to 5 February 2019, more than US$1.2 million in cash was withdrawn over the counter from two customers’ accounts in the UAE without the Bank’s Jersey branch (five to nine staff, against the wider group’s billion-pound profits) querying a pattern of withdrawals that changed materially over time. The Royal Court was explicit that neither customer was suspected of money laundering or any other offence; the charge was aimed squarely at the adequacy of the Bank’s own procedures.

The same pattern holds in AG v LGL Trustees Limited [2021] JRC 058: a £550,000 fine (plus £50,000 costs) for two breaches of Article 37(4), down from £1.2 million after credit given for an early guilty plea and further mitigation. Again, there was no suggestion the funds themselves were tainted, the risk was of corrupt misuse of funds within an investment structure LGL administered, not proven laundering.

Together, the two cases confirm the working assumption in this jurisdiction: Jersey’s courts will impose substantial, business-affecting penalties for systemic AML control failures whether or not any underlying laundering is ever proven. The robustness of the framework, and the perception of it, is treated as the relevant harm in itself.

The same pattern is visible just across the water, and it points to where Jersey’s own record may be heading. In March 2026 the Guernsey Financial Services Commission fined Utmost Worldwide Limited £1,960,000, its largest-ever discretionary penalty, for AML failings in its life insurance business spanning 2015 to 2025. At its peak the company held around 22,500 high-risk clients but reviewed fewer than 4% of them annually. One went unreviewed for fourteen years, and a separate client’s status as a politically exposed person went undetected for thirteen. Unlike the Jersey cases above, the regulator did not stop at the entity: its CEO (and former CFO) was personally fined £35,000, and its former deputy MLRO was fined £10,500 and barred from MLRO or MLCO roles for a year and five months. No Jersey prosecution has yet reached past the entity to the individuals responsible.

A third strand of the toolkit has, so far, gone unused entirely. Article 35A of the Proceeds of Crime Law, in force since June 2022, creates a standalone failure-to-prevent-money-laundering offence that needs no proof of dishonesty or knowledge on the business’s own part. Four years on, there have been no prosecutions under it. Jersey has also not followed the UK in extending the same logic to fraud.

Jersey’s only Deferred Prosecution Agreement

Jersey’s Deferred Prosecution Agreements Law came into force on 3 March 2023, and to date there has been only one instance: AG v AFEX Offshore (Jersey) Limited [2024] JRC 271, on which Simon Thomas of Baker & Partners (with assistance from Barry Faudemer of Baker Regulatory Services) advised throughout the self-report and DPA process.

The chronology is instructive for any entity weighing up a self-report. AFEX approached the Law Officers’ Department in March 2023 (the very month the DPA Law came into force) despite already being under criminal investigation (a production order had been granted in July 2022, covering what became Counts 1 to 5). A formal self-report followed on 1 June 2023, with a supplemental report on 12 July addressing further conduct that became Counts 6 to 11, including, in one count, a failure to reassess the risk of continuing to rely on IQEQ (Jersey) Limited after IQEQ’s own JFSC penalty and public statement in July 2022.

The Royal Court approved a total financial penalty of £408,240 plus £60,000 in costs, and approved two Independent Monitors. It did not simply rubber-stamp the Attorney General’s approach. While it accepted the final figure as having real economic bite given AFEX’s finances, it expressly disagreed with an additional 28% discount layered on top of the standard one-third guilty-plea credit, noting that an entity should not expect an automatic extra discount simply for self-reporting. It also flagged, for future cases, that penalties involving money paid away through control failures should reflect the amount that flowed through the entity rather than just its fee income.

By comparison, the Attorney General’s starting points in the Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank (£800,000) and LGL Trustees (£1.2 million) Proceeds of Crime Law proceedings were both higher than AFEX’s, reflecting lower transaction values. This was despite, on the Attorney General’s own assessment, AFEX’s conduct having opened a materially higher-risk gateway to laundering.

More than three years on, AFEX remains the only entity to have entered a DPA in Jersey. The requirement to self-report a prescribed offence as a precondition may simply be culturally unattractive, and there remains an open question as to whether entities are sufficiently incentivised to disclose at all, particularly now the Court has signalled that extra discounts beyond the standard guilty-plea credit should not be assumed.

Sanctions

The sanctions reporting net has widened too. The Sanctions and Asset-Freezing (Jersey) Law Amendment Regulations 2026, in force from 18 March, amend the Sanctions and Asset-Freezing (Jersey) Law 2019 in three ways: (1) they extend the prohibition on making funds available to a designated person to anyone owned or controlled by that person, (2) they allow broader disclosure of sanctions-related information where the Minister for External Relations is satisfied it is appropriate, and (3), bringing Jersey closer to the UK’s approach, they remove the requirement that a relevant financial institution have some existing connection to a person (e.g. an account, a dealing, an approach) before it must report a suspicion under Article 32(1). An RFI must now report a reasonable suspicion regardless of whether it has ever done business with the person concerned.

Company law has been tightened on the sanctions side too. The Director Disqualification Sanctions (Jersey) Amendment Law 2026, adopted on 25 March 2026 but not yet in force, closes a gap in the existing regime. Under the current sanctions framework, a director or LLC manager who becomes subject to sanctions is already disqualified by operation of law, but there has been no equivalent restriction on appointment. The amendment addresses that mismatch, extending the regime to prevent sanctioned persons from being appointed in the first place — aligning the treatment of entry into, and continuation in, office.

In terms of sanctions-related litigation, the Roman Abramovich matter remains the most significant sanctions-related litigation Jersey has seen. The freeze on more than $7 billion in assets connected to Abramovich, put in place following his UK sanctions designation in March 2022, remains in force. Challenges to the underlying investigation, including an application for judicial review, have been unsuccessful, and a subsequent appeal was dismissed. A separate strand of litigation concerns Mr Abramovich’s attempts to obtain personal data held by the Government of Jersey under data protection law. The Royal Court has found the Government in breach of its data protection obligations and has been critical of aspects of how disclosure was handled, with a substantive trial on compliance now expected in 2027. Mr Abramovich has separately brought a claim against the UK before the European Court of Human Rights concerning the Jersey investigation. Associated litigation concerning alleged breaches of Jersey’s data protection law by various ministers and governmental organisations remains ongoing, with Baker & Partners’ Simon Thomas instructed by the Chief Officer of the States of Jersey Police.

Cross-border fraud, asset tracing and trust disputes

Cross‑border fraud and enforcement work in Jersey continues to centre on asset tracing, creditor recovery and challenges to the movement of assets through trust structures. That pattern is reflected in recent cases involving Emirates NBD Bank PJSC, in which William Redgrave of Baker & Partners has acted for the creditor bank, as well as in the wider body of trust litigation that continues to develop alongside them.

One such case is Emirates NBD Bank PJSC v Almakhawi and Ors [2024] JRC 265, a striking recent illustration of the Pauline jurisdiction at work. The first defendant had guaranteed financing for System Construct Dubai LLC, which defaulted in 2014. The bank ultimately obtained judgment against him in Dubai in the sum of AED 211 million (in excess of £45 million), with the claim growing to more than AED 613 million (in excess of £126 million) with interest. In the period following default and judgment, the defendant settled two Jersey trusts and moved substantial assets into them, including US$20,911,312.82 and, later, his interest in a New York apartment. The Royal Court found that, whatever his evidence about succession planning, a substantial purpose of those transfers was to place assets beyond the reach of his creditors, and set them aside.

A second, more recent Emirates NBD matter shows the same trajectory at an earlier stage. In Emirates NBD Bank PJSC v GlenQ Nominees Limited and Ors [2026] JRC 038, the bank obtained post‑judgment disclosure from Jersey trust company defendants in support of its efforts to enforce a £14.5 million Dubai Court of Cassation judgment against a Qatari national, where assets were believed to have been moved into a Jersey trust structure holding fourteen English properties. The purpose of such disclosure is to identify assets and understand the structure through which they are held, informing further steps in enforcement. The Royal Court’s description of Jersey’s position a “permissive approach to disclosure orders sought in aid of the enforcement of foreign judgments” illustrates the extent to which third‑party disclosure can be used to support asset recovery, including as a precursor to substantive claims where appropriate.

The Attorney General’s own record shows the same willingness to assist overseas authorities, over a much longer timescale. AG v Smith and Cochrane [2025] JRC 256 concerned a variation of the saisie judiciaire over the realisable property of Gerald Martin Smith, sentenced in the UK in 2006 to eight years’ imprisonment for theft and false accounting and ordered, the following year, to pay £40,956,911 under a Confiscation Order. Jersey registered that order as an External Confiscation Order in 2010, and the saisie judiciaire has run continuously since, for two decades and counting.

What needs to improve

As with any jurisdiction, more can always be done to prevent and detect financial crime and, where it is detected, to take appropriate enforcement action. The difficulty Jersey faces, in common with every jurisdiction, is that most measures to combat financial crime are necessarily reactive, responding to threats as bad actors find increasingly creative means of generating and laundering criminal property. It is correspondingly difficult to predict future trends and to legislate for them in advance.

What emerges instead is less a story of new ideas than of recalibration and testing. On the building side: a penalty regime restored and reshaped to share revenue with Government, an AML/CFT/CPF Handbook overhaul, a beneficial ownership register edging toward wider access, a sanctions reporting net cast wider, and a whistleblowing law that would finally give Jersey something every neighbouring jurisdiction except Guernsey already has. On the using side: a Royal Court still finding the edges of a relatively new DPA regime, a failure‑to‑prevent offence that has yet to be tried once, a corporate manslaughter gap that has outlasted multiple attempts to close it, and an enforcement record that, unlike Guernsey’s, has not yet reached past the entity to the individuals who ran it. The tools are mostly there. The question is how far they will, in practice, be picked up.

The UK, for its part, has continued to widen the scope of corporate criminal liability. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 came into force on 29 June this year, marking the third and final stage of an overhaul that began with the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. The first stage made it easier to attribute certain economic crimes to a company through the acts of its senior managers, while the second introduced a failure to prevent fraud offence for large organisations. The third stage represents a much broader shift, making any company or firm, regardless of size, strictly liable for any offence committed by a senior manager acting within their actual or apparent authority. By contrast, Jersey’s reforms have so far extended only to the more limited failure to prevent money laundering offence. If the UK is now moving towards a general senior-manager attribution model, pressure is likely to grow on Jersey to consider whether its own corporate liability framework remains fit for purpose.

How can Baker & Partners help you?

Baker & Partners has worked on many of the most significant and high-profile white-collar crime matters in Jersey, for prosecution and defence alike, including advising the only entity to have entered a Deferred Prosecution Agreement in the Island to date. We are regularly instructed by the Attorney General in the more serious prosecution cases, and our white-collar crime work spans money laundering, regulatory enforcement, fraud and corruption.

If you would like advice, please get in touch with your usual Baker & Partners contact, or any member of the team listed. Visit our Criminal Prosecution & Defence page for more information on our White-Collar Crime expertise.