Introduction

The offence of money laundering, as per the definition in Black’s Law Dictionary is “the act of transferring illegally obtained money through legitimate people or accounts so that its original source cannot be traced”. Further to this definition, it is only but natural to assume that the money, if illegally obtained, must be obtained in relation to the commission of an underlying criminal offence. The commission and requirement of this underlying offence, commonly known as a predicate offence, has been a point of debate since the introduction of the Prevention and Money Laundering Act, 2002 (“the Act”), which provides a list of offences in the Schedule appended thereto as ‘scheduled offences’.Continue Reading The Concept of Predicate Offence: The Supreme Court Clarifies