Only five people have been convicted of beefed-up money laundering offences since the regime was overhauled a decade ago, it was revealed yesterday.

The revelation comes as police and financial regulators are examining claims that Britain’s biggest high street banks were involved in a multibillion-dollar Russian money laundering scheme that threatens to engulf the City in scandal.

This morning, The Times reports on the results of a Freedom of Information Act request by the business crime team at the London law firm Howard Kennedy only five individuals have been found guilty under the Money Laundering Regulations 2007.

No convictions were secured under the legislation until 2012 when one individual was found guilty. Since then there have been five more proceedings and four convictions.

The regulations apply to several sectors including financial and credit institutions, accountants, casinos, lawyers and estate agents. They require those regulated to put in place robust anti-laundering policies and procedures.

The regulation created more than 20 offences, all of which are considered serious enough to be tried in a crown court with a maximum sentence of two years.

“It is not entirely clear why there have been so few prosecutions and the figures don’t reveal which sector the offenders came from,” Ian Ryan, a partner at the firm, said. “However, given how often we hear that London is a haven for money launderers it seems that law enforcement is missing a trick here and not using a weapon in its arsenal in the fight against global crime.”

Britain’s financial watchdog has overturned a ruling that it unfairly identified an individual banker when it fined JP Morgan Chase more than £137 million as part of the “London Whale” scandal.

The bank’s international chief investment officer had argued that the watchdog, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), had referred to a part of the bank’s management structure which identified him. The executive maintained that as a result he should have been given third-party rights in accordance with the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000. This would have given him the opportunity to respond to the FCA’s allegations before it issued its public notice.

The executive had managed Bruno Iksil, the trader nicknamed the London Whale for the size of his trades. The case resulted in $6.2 billion losses for the bank and fines on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Supreme Court yesterday backed an appeal by the FCA and, by a majority of four to one, overturned a Court of Appeal ruling. Lawyers said that the ruling would come as a relief to FCA bosses. “The overturned Court of Appeal decision exposed the tension between the FCA’s desire to quickly settle regulatory investigations into financial institutions and its public criticism of the employees of those companies necessitated by those settlements,” Chris Dyke, a lawyer at London law firm Corker Binning, said.

“The time and resources required to deal with the interventions and representations of a potentially very large pool of individuals would have been a very heavy burden for the FCA and could have significantly slowed the speed of regulatory enforcement,” he said.

Alison Geary, a lawyer in the London office of US law firm WilmerHale, said that the Supreme Court’s judgment “required a balancing act between the need for the FCA to move forward with its investigations and the rights of those individuals who are ultimately the subject of such investigations. Here the scales have been tipped firmly in favour of the FCA.”

On the majority side of the ruling were Lord Justice Neuberger, the court’s president, and Lords Sumption, Mance and Hodge; Lord Wilson dissented on the ground that the majority’s approach did not strike a fair balance between individual reputation and regulatory efficiency.

More than three quarters of the UK’s multinational businesses anticipate that Britain’s withdrawal from the EU will damage their profits, a survey from a transatlantic law firm revealed yesterday.

The survey of more than 200 senior executives at multinational corporations found that they were pessimistic over the five-year outlook after Brexit. Of all the businesses surveyed, about two thirds forecast that Brexit would negatively affect their profits. About one in six said that they expected the drop in profits to be more than 5 per cent.

According to the research from the Anglo-US firm Hogan Lovells, more than half of British businesses support some form of transitional agreement with the remaining EU bloc that would allow for a “soft Brexit”. However, the survey still found a significant number of businesses on both sides of the channel adopting a “let's get on with it” attitude, despite the concerns and uncertainty they had expressed about the impact.

The researchers found that companies in the US were more positive about potential trade agreements resulting from Brexit than other non-EU countries. Still, only a third of US companies predicted that Brexit would be positive for their business. Slightly more than a quarter of US companies described Brexit as a threat to their profits.

A 25-year-old pupil barrister has won first prize at this year’s Times-One Essex Court Law Awards for her essay on whether MPs should be able to overrule the Brexit referendum result.

Genevieve Woods -- a pupil at Three Raymond Buildings chambers in Gray’s Inn, who aims to practise human rights and public law when she qualifies -- picked up a first prize cheque for £3,500.

The 200-plus entries for this year's competition were judged by a panel headed by Lord Reid, Supreme Court justice and including Lord Grabiner, QC, head of One Essex Court chambers; John Witherow, editor of The Times and Derek Spitz, a barrister at OEC.

In her winning essay, she argued that “it was parliament which decided to subject itself to EU law in 1972, and parliament has always had the power to repeal that legislation. Whether to do so is a choice that cannot be forced upon it by a referendum or subverted by a desperate executive.”

Ms Woods told The Brief that she aspired to become a lawyer “because I believe that justice is the foundation of peace, on both an international and an individual level”.

The pupil barrister, who is applying for a placement at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, added that “good lawyers don’t just interpret the law, but also shape it, and, in a divided society, the law can be used to ensure equality and protect values. I want to be part of that process, to strive for fairness and help those who need an advocate in adversity.”

The second place award of £2,500 went to Leo Kirby, a 23-year-old student at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, who has also studied at Stanford University in California.

Third place -- worth £1,500 -- went to Yuan Yi Zhu, a 23-year-old Oxford University student.

The three runners up were: Dominic Behar, 24, a student at the Bloomsbury branch of the University of Law in London; James Kirby, 28, a student at the City branch of the University of London; and Krishan Nadesan, a 24-year-old trainee at Clifford Chance, one of London’s five international “magic circle” law firms. The were awarded £1,000 each.

• The awards were to have been presented at a dinner in Whitehall last night, which was cancelled because of the Westminster attacks.
  

In today’s Times Law …

• Could the referendum be overruled? Winning Times/One Essex Court law award essay
  
• Truss ‘completely wrong’ over judges
  
• Who gets to decide what happens to our estates when we die?
  
• Commercial courts: a big rebranding
  
• Understanding causes of gender pay gaps
  
• Millennials – how to keep employees happy
  
• Scottish law firms can learn a lot from football’s strugglers
• Lawyer of the week: Samantha Leek, QC
  
• Edward Fennell’s diary: Slapper scholarship
  
• Law reports: Deporting recalcitrant foreign criminal

Elsewhere …

• Millionaires go to court over parking space -- The Times
  
• Thames Water fined £20m after flooding river with sewage -- The Times
  
• Welsh law officer vows to defend 'integrity' of devolved justice – Law Gazette
  
• Lawyer for Russian whistleblower’s family falls from window – Wall Street Journal
  
• Judge who blocked Trump travel ban gets police protection – Hawaii News
  
• Germany to officially pardon 50,000 gay men convicted under Nazi-era law criminalising homosexuality – The Independent