The U.S. Justice Department revised guidelines on prosecuting corporate wrongdoers Thursday, following pressure from lawmakers and businesses that said it had overzealously pushed companies to waive their attorney-client privileges.
The U.S. Justice Department will more aggressively use legal tools to freeze assets and detect financial wrongdoing as part of a larger strategy to combat international organized crime, the department said today.
Regulators spent less face time addressing AML concerns as the lion's share of regulatory attention was devoted to subprime lending standards and the broader credit crisis. But, when financial regulators and the Justice Department weighed in, they did so heavily, assessing record penalties.
Prosecutions and convictions citing 18 USC 1956, the primary money laundering statute, are up over 350 percent in 2007 from the previous year in cases involving national security and terrorism, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a Syracuse University organization.
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