investigator to build on the information provided by the technology. Beyond the technology, having experts in-house is critical to our approach. You cannot attend a conference on asset recovery now without the word ‘crypto’ being mentioned. As we have seen with drug taking in sport, criminals are often at the forefront of innovation and a couple of steps ahead of the authorities, leaving investigators, lawyers and law enforcement playing catch up, even when it comes to legislation. At K2, we now have crypto professionals in-house. This capability and true understanding of the technology and ways it can be used are critical to our investigations. What challenges can occur when seeking or obtaining information about assets and enforcing their recovery? One of the biggest hurdles we face as investigators can be proving that the subject of any set of legal proceedings is the true beneficiary of the assets that we have identified. It may be the case that we have multiple pieces of information pointing to ownership by the subject, but legally speaking that person may not be the “paper” owner of the asset. Individuals can go to great lengths to obfuscate their links to assets. Common strategies here include using proxies to hold assets on trust, employing nominee shareholders and directors and also relying on the secrecy that surrounds ownership of entities registered in offshore jurisdictions. Only in recent years, a small number of corporate registries in these jurisdictions have begun releasing the details of company directors. However, this is as far as most offshore jurisdictions will go. Details of corporate ownership typically remains opaque, despite various governmental efforts to improve this. For instance, if an overseas company owns property in the UK, there is now an obligation for those companies to register details of their WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM 27
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