Property Week’s offshore report makes waves

David Cameron was quite right to hold up a mirror to London and to the property sector; for too long too many have chosen to look the other way. It is time that we cleaned up our act and that, I’m afraid, includes the law profession and accountants.

While a dodgy agent would be very helpful to a would-be money launderer, it is very hard for property to be the currency of choice for shady dealers without a bent lawyer. Estate agents and those who profess to regulate or guide them still have much to do to clean up their act and improve their systems, but I’m afraid the legal profession needs to first accept its part in the problem. Let’s be in no doubt: this is criminal activity and we all need to help chop out this cancer even if that means exposing our friends and colleagues. It is no wonder the National Crime Agency can’t put a figure to the total amount of money being laundered, but it is woeful that it can’t.

Dodgy deals are not harmless, victimless crimes. Notwithstanding the child prostitutes, drugs or arms that generate these piles of septic cash, those living close by - perhaps in other flats in the same block - all suffer too. The time is fast approaching when buyers will discount the asking price on a property owned by even a respectable offshore-owned property simply because the association will have a price.

Finally, a perhaps not unexpected word about those organisations that profess to represent or even regulate residential property. The two loudest voices have both been bogged down in opaque investigations since Channel 4’s uncomfortable film From Russia with Cash earlier in the summer. We don’t need students of the Earl Haig school - leadership comes from the front, not five miles behind the lines. Like the Law Society, the RICS and the National Association of Estate Agents need to grow a backbone; they need to admit that there is a problem and act. Poncing around waving a Royal Charter doesn’t frighten international criminals or those who advise them, it doesn’t help their own members who want to know what they should do and it doesn’t protect the public whom they claim to serve.

Henry Pryor, buying agent and property commentator