Reflections on legal deficiences and discordances affecting mutual legal assistance in criminal asset recovery

Abstract

Most of the legal impediments that appears in front of the criminal assets recovery at the international level are the requirements for mutual legal assistance (MLA); excessive banking secrecy; lack of procedures for non-conviction-based confiscation; and excessively difficult procedural and evidentiary laws. Removing legal impediments is obviously essential. Absent a clear and sound legal framework, asset recovery becomes, in a best-case scenario, arduous and, in a worst-case scenario, impossible. Thus, the analysis of the reports of the practitioners in the field at international level, can offer us solutions, which will raise the state to another level. The long process of asset recovery and the low level of cooperation is the best evidence of the shortcomings that stagnate the process of recovering criminal assets.