Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the total value was of criminal assets laundered abroad identified by British law enforcement agencies in each year since 2009 by country; and how much of those assets in each such country (a) has been recovered and (b) is recoverable.
As the Government set out in the Action Plan for anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist finance, there is no definitive measure of the scale of money laundering, but the best available international estimate, by the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC), of amounts laundered globally are equivalent to 2.7% of global GDP or US$1.6 trillion in 2009.
Criminal assets recovered since 2009 under asset sharing arrangements are set out below for England and Wales. The figures below do not contain the amounts recovered by police in England and Wales as a result of their investigations, as these figures are not held centrally.