Study On The Judicial Application Of Money Laundering Crime

The series of amendments to the specific norms of money laundering crime in Article 14 of the Amendment(XI)to the Criminal Law is a response to the top-level design guidelines in China and the complicated and complicated pressure from abroad,and it is also an important measure to change the current weakness of the legislation and judicial field in combating money laundering crime in China and to comply with the general trend of the times to increase the fight against money laundering crime.This paper will take the ideas and specific contents of this amendment as a guide,and take the people’s court decisions after the official implementation of the Amendment(XI)to the Criminal Law as a starting point to explore the actual judicial application of money laundering crimes in the past two years and discuss the judicial application problems faced by China in the process of combating money laundering crimes at present.The paper also proposes reasonable improvement measures based on respecting the existing criminal legislation and the current judicial practice in China.The main text mainly includes the following four parts.The first part is a general description of the crime of money laundering.By briefly describing the history of money laundering crime,we introduce the legislative development of money laundering crime and its related crimes in our country and summarize the background and specific contents of the amendment to the Criminal Law(Eleventh),and on this basis,we outline the new development characteristics of money laundering crime that should be faced by the judicial application in the current globalization context.The second part presents an empirical analysis of the current situation of judicial application in China.Firstly,this paper uses the Anti-Money Laundering Report published by the Anti-Money Laundering Bureau of the People’s Bank of China in recent years as a basis to count the number of cases of money laundering crimes and related crimes.After that,we summarize the verdicts related to money laundering crimes published in China’s Judicial Documents Website in the past two years after the Amendment(XI)to the Criminal Law came into effect,and summarize the specific situation of money laundering crimes in the judicial application from various perspectives,such as the predicate crimes,the common ways of money laundering,the occurrence of self-laundering behaviors,and the sentences of money laundering crimes.Based on the statistics of the sample cases in the previous section,the third section will sort out the details of the current judicial application of the crime of money laundering and its specific modifications(including the criminalization of self-money laundering,the deletion of "knowingly" from the legal provisions,the expansion of money laundering settlement methods,the expansion of types of behavior and the changes of statutory penalties).The main problems in the judicial application of the crime of money laundering are analyzed.In terms of the number of crimes,there is some confusion between the number of crimes committed by the people’s courts and those committed by the predicate crimes;in terms of the determination of the manner of committing the crime,the "bottom clause" of the money laundering crime has been applied excessively in the context of increasing the efforts to combat money laundering crimes;in terms of the range of sentences,the determination of "aggravating circumstances" is not sufficient.In terms of sentencing range,there has been a lack of clear guidelines for the determination of "aggravating circumstances";in terms of the application of penalties for this crime,the overall criminal sanctions are not strong,the introduction of unlimited fines has not been effectively applied on the one hand,and on the other hand,there are certain defects that need to be optimized,and the punishment for specific criminal subjects is lacking.In the fourth part,we analyze and propose the corresponding solutions to the current problems of judicial application of money laundering crimes in China by combining real cases.In terms of the relationship with the predicate offense,the theory of several crimes should be adhered to for the act of self-laundering and the predicate offense,and the scope of the predicate offense should be avoided without value expansion.Finally,we should also pay attention to the role of the case guidance system in regulating the application of the "underwriting clause";the criteria for determining the "aggravating circumstances" should be analyzed from the amount of money laundering,the type of predicate crime,the amount of proceeds,whether there is repeated money laundering,whether there is a bad record of money laundering,etc.In terms of penalties for this crime,under the legislative trend of increasing the penalties for money laundering,the application of the newly amended fine penalty should be optimized or a multiplier penalty system should be introduced with reference to the relevant experience of financial crimes,while the criminal liability of the subject of money laundering should be continuously refined by means of increasing the crackdown on unit crimes and establishing additional qualification penalties to strengthen the crackdown on the subject of specific crimes.