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5 articles
Trade-based money laundering moves value through invoices, shipping documents and customs declarations rather than bank transfers. Britain's compliance focus remains fixed on payments, leaving the paper border under-scrutinised. Better cross-agency data sharing could close the gap before the next sanctions-evasion scandal arrives.
HMRC supervises art market participants, but galleries, auction houses and private dealers still operate with uneven beneficial-ownership checks and porous provenance records. This investigation examines how storage, intermediaries and weak ownership transparency allow sanctioned money to buy respectability on British walls, and what a credible 2026 baseline should require.
Britain's freeports combine customs reliefs, fragmented oversight, and complex ownership chains. Trace maps the practical red flags for banks, freight forwarders, and compliance teams, and sets out what a 2026 policy response should look like before the next scandal lands.
English football's ownership tests are not sanctions screening by another name. Offshore holding companies, related-party sponsorship and transfer payments through intermediaries can leave clubs exposed long after a takeover is approved.
A year after mandatory identity verification became a condition of UK company formation and directorship, the register is cleaner at the edges but not necessarily harder to abuse. Trace examines the filings, removals and enforcement notices to separate the reform's real gains from its remaining blind spots.