International Standards to Combat the Laundering of Proceeds Gained by Criminal Means

The purpose of this article is to examine international standards against the laundering of organized crime proceeds. The methodological background is made of comparative law, as well as general scientific methods of the research (induction, deduction, analysis, synthesis). The main finding of the study is that international standards attach special attention to the laundering of organized crime proceeds. However, they didn’t point at the higher menace of such laundering to the community compared to other types of predicate offenses. The international standards against money laundering provide for a rather broadside approach to characterization of the offense under question. In addition to two common offenses that form money laundering (conversion or transfer of criminal property; concealment or disguise of nature, origin, location, placement, or movement of criminal property), the boundaries of criminal liability within the national criminal law can be stretched to complicity in this crime, inchoate money laundering, as well as cases of possession, use, and disposal of criminal property. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.