萬國法律事務所

An amended draft of the Money Laundering Control Act is currently being deliberated by the Legislature in Taiwan, which if passed and enacted will authorize prosecutors of the extended crime gains to utilise confiscation. Presently, the Act only allows confiscation for the obvious criminal gains. The amended act would authorize prosecutors to confiscate suspicious or apparent criminal gains until the legitimacy of the gains are proved. The enforcement of the amended Act will enter into force in June 2017 at the earliest, if the Third Reading of the same goes smoothly before the end of 2016.

The deliberated article regulates confiscation of the property or property interests including those properties transferred, changed, concealed, hidden, received, obtained, processed, and or used in violation of the money laundering law; and to confiscate property or property interests that are suspiciously received, processed, or used in apparent violation of the money laundering law. For instance, the amended Act would apply where an individual is unemployed or his (her) account is used for money laundering, and said individual has significant amounts of cash, and a prosecutor becomes aware that this person may have acted in violation of the money laundering law, but cannot specifically identify the crime committed by this individual. The article under deliberation could help prosecutors confiscate such crime gains early and hold the same until the individual can provide evidence/proof of the legitimacy of these income sources.

The article also authorizes prosecutors to confiscate property or property interests obtained from crimes committed by a group or often used in money-laundering cases. The article regulating such crime in money-laundering is amended to target specifically telecom frauds or cases such as the First Bank ATM robbery in July 2016.

Prosecutors express great support for the new article. Currently, prosecutors need to identify which property or property interests are related to or which individual committed the crime and then confiscate these criminal gains. In practice, the current law can be difficult to execute with respect to confiscations. If the amended Money Laundering Control Act is passed, it will help prosecutors confiscate criminal gains and suspected offenders will have the responsibility of proving that the property or property interests are clean in order to retrieve the same from confiscation.