MONEY LAUNDERING, PREDICATE OFFENCES AND PROFESSIONAL MONEY LAUNDERING PERPETRATORS

Money laundering is a serious offence mostly connected to organized crime that undermines financial integrity and markets, and erodes public trust in institutions. Money laundering is a process of converting or infiltrating the proceeds of illegal activities into legal businesses, without revealing their true source in order to obtain full legality of these proceeds at the end of this complex process. There are three basic phases (stages) of money laundering detected in the practice: placement, layering and integration. Namely, the illegally obtained money normally is a product of criminal offences known in the criminal law theory as predicate offences. These are the offences preceding the money laundering process. The issue of predicate offences is closely addressed in the 6th AML EU Directive elaborated in the article. The relevant Macedonian anti money laundering (AML) legislation consists of many provisions of different laws, of which most important are the Criminal Code provision of Money Laundering and the Law on Prevention of Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism. However, the most recent practice turned the attention to specific category of perpetrators of money laundering, called professional money launderers (PMLs): attorneys, notaries, accountants etc. By misusing their powers they might assists the criminals in covering the origin of their assets or simply assisting by omission, by not reporting the suspicious cases and clients and by not check the origin of the assets when obliged by law.