Is the government a money launderer?

I love the reliance on the box-ticking process to which the powers-that-be resort when faced with the grubby, inconvenient reality of tax evasion, money laundering, and the assorted pickpocketry of the well-advised.

Anyone who knows anything about the sector knows that London and the capitals of assorted States of Trump’s United Empire, not to mention diverse European centres of excellence, are past masters at form overriding substance.

In other words, launder your misbegotten spondoolicks until they shine brightly, and as long as you fill in the forms, you’re good to go.

Our very own various revenue laws (Amendment) Act 2025 provides the exculpatory form par excellence. It is a piece of legislative housekeeping so tidy, so antiseptic, that you could almost forget what it is tidying away.

With all the bureaucratic calm of a notary stamping a true copy of a passport, crime becomes a negotiable inconvenience.

It’s called a “special mechanism for out-of-court settlements”, just as if it were allowing for a parking ticket to be forgotten, rather than whitewashing conduct that, in any functioning system, would attract the full glare of a criminal court.

The choreography is so elegant: Submit a request, file corrected declarations, receive a draft agreement, sign on the dotted line. Six months, give or take. A bit longer if one needs to assess the “illicit proceeds”, an almost charming euphemism for the spoils of your nefariousness.

And then, with a smile and a payment on taxes, interest, calibrated somewhere between a slap on the wrist and a mildly stern glance, something remarkable happens. Criminal liability evaporates – not just for the tax offence itself, but for the “connected breaches” orbiting it: Fraud, conspiracy, even money laundering where it served the same purpose.

Or so we are led to think, given that we are spared the chore of good drafting and rigorous enactment. We are assured, we think, that certain lines remain uncrossable. Bribery, extortion, and abuse of public authority are excluded.

This, you may think, is a statement of the bleeding obvious, but the drafting does leave a rather large, rather shadowy middle ground in which the distinction between the excluded and the included becomes, how shall I put it, somewhat opaque?

This is where the real mischief lies – in what we will never see.

Settlement of a case in this way requires only the testimony of a tax jobsworth that an agreement has been reached.
We get no trial, no evidence tested in open court, and no uncomfortable narratives laid bare. Reputations or electoral prospects remain untroubled.

We will never know what nefariousness has been papered over. Whether bribery has been politely redescribed as something tax-evasion adjacent, or whether corruption has been neatly laundered into administrative compliance, will remain unanswered, buried deep in the heart of the Great Panjandrum of the Revenue Department.

How dare you even think to ask whether fraud and general larceny have been rendered, by the simple alchemy of payment, chaste and pure? You are a mere citizen, paying your taxes and trusting in the Great and the Good to be, well, great and good.

This is a jurisdiction that has avoided being blacklisted because, try not to smile, it demands, with all the subtlety of a threat dressed up as regulation, exhaustive due diligence from anyone who so much as looks sideways at a euro.

Banks, professionals, and companies are enjoined to identify, verify, report and justify. If they fail, the State falls upon them with the full majesty of the law.

The question thus poses itself: Will the same rigour apply to the State itself when it sits across the table, quietly regularising what was once criminal?

Will it interrogate the provenance of funds with the same zeal it expects of others? Will it probe, document, and challenge or will it accept, record, and move on, case closed?

If the State is not seen to hold itself to the very standards it pretends to enforce – not by polite requests, but by demands with menaces – it risks something far more corrosive than administrative untidiness.

It risks being seen as complicit in money laundering itself. Don’t you just love the circular irony?