It is 10 years this month since the publication of the Panama Papers, which shone a light on 11.5 million confidential documents held by the former Panamanian law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The documents contained information on anonymous shell companies and off-shore accounts used to conceal wealth and obscure ownership and, the leakers declared, facilitate corruption and crime.
I wrote about it at the time, in April 2016. Looking back at what I predicted in an article headed ‘The consequences for lawyers of the Panama Papers’, I was both wrong and right.
I was wrong because I thought that the main fall-out would be around whether allowance would continue to be made for professional secrecy, if global public sentiment felt that lawyers were hiding illegal, or even just morally dubious, transactions behind the cover of professional secrecy. But in fact there has been barely a further serious dent in professional secrecy, and all lawyers would doubtless applaud that.
And yet there have been consequences for us, of which maybe the most serious is that we are regularly now included in the slur of ‘professional enablers’, which I did not predict.
Take this from the UK government’s anti-corruption strategy, published at the end of last year:
‘a minority subset of financial and professional services firms known as "professional enablers" play a key role in helping corrupt and other malign actors … The actions of professional enablers worry the British public, with 70% concerned about the possibility of UK professional services such as lawyers or accountants using financial structures to conceal or transfer wealth on behalf of corrupt actors from abroad.'
This is a slur that we will escape from only with difficulty. I believe that there will be yet another report on the topic when the World Bank and UN Stolen Assets Recovery initiative (StAR) publish an Enablers Report in a couple of months, focusing on areas where legal professional privilege may create tension with transparency and anti-money laundering regulations. (In its founding report, StAR highlighted the role of lawyers in stolen assets recovery, citing, for instance, how it took Nigeria five years to obtain a repatriation decision from the Swiss authorities in relation to assets claimed by Nigeria from former President Abacha, due to numerous appeals brought by the Abachas, ‘who employed large numbers of lawyers to block or slow down the case’.)
The audit of my own predictions is unimportant. Of more importance is what an organisation like Transparency International thinks - it has been looking back at the promises and the failures over the last 10 years following the Panama Papers publication.
Among the successful policy changes that it credits to the Panama Papers is the introduction of beneficial ownership registers. In the UK, since the Register of Overseas Entities (ROE) was first introduced in August 2022, overseas entities which hold or acquire interests in UK land must register certain information about their beneficial owners with Companies House. There is also a Trust Registration Service (TRS).
In the EU, there is BORIS, a tool for linking national central registers containing information on the beneficial owners of companies and trusts and other types of legal arrangements. To date, the registers in 15 member states, plus Iceland, can be searched.
Transparency International also considers that the extension of anti-money laundering obligations to professionals such as lawyers, accountants and company service providers who design and manage offshore structures has been a policy success in various countries, including the UK. Indeed, the UK government trumpets the recent change of bringing lawyers, accountants, and trust and company service providers under the single roof of the Financial Conduct Authority for the purposes of responsibility for AML/CTF supervision as being one of its signature moves in the framework of its 2025 anti-corruption strategy (although the FCA move was announced a couple of months before the strategy itself was published).
But this is not enough for Transparency International. It indicates some progress, but still says:
‘Gatekeeper professions remain a critical weak point. While regulation has increased, coverage gaps remain, while supervision is ineffective and accountability for facilitating money laundering is rare. Around the world, lawyers often fall outside the full scope of anti-money laundering obligations when they provide financial and corporate services.’
There will be an imminent opportunity to rehearse all these arguments. As part of its new anti-corruption strategy, the UK will hold an Illicit Finance Summit at Lancaster House in London over two days from 23-24 June 2026, bringing together governments, civil society organisations, and private sector representatives, such as major banks. The government aims to build an international coalition to tackle flows of dirty money, and to strengthen the UK’s national security.
This is an area where we need our reputation strongly defended (I got that right in my 2016 predictions). A small minority should not taint the whole.
Jonathan Goldsmith is Law Society Council member for EU & International, chair of the Law Society’s Policy & Regulatory Affairs Committee and a member of its board. All views expressed are personal and are not made in his capacity as a Law Society Council member, nor on behalf of the Law Society
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