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Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (References to Financial Investigators) (Amendment) Order 2009

My Lords, I, too, contributed to the Proceeds of Crime Bill when it went through this House. I have also had some practical experience of the Act in operation. As previous speakers have said, it was designed to deal with large-scale crime and terrorism. The architecture of the Act is that an investigator seizes an individual’s assets, and it is then for that individual to prove that those assets are not the proceeds of crime. Was it seriously to be the case that the investigators employed by these various agencies—local authorities and so on—should have the power to seize assets and throw the burden of proving that they were legitimately obtained upon the person concerned? That is what the Act was all about. It had nothing to do with the trivialities that the order seems to have brought forth.