Financial Crime in the Mass Media: TV Crime Dramas

In order to determine how the importance of international financial crime is being treated by contemporary society and other aspects of the mass media, CBIA.watch is creating a series of articles on how and to what extent other forms of cultural expression explore and examine the topic. Undoubtedly leading the way in this endeavour is the immensely popular television genre of the crime drama, which is taking increasingly ingenious steps towards making cross-border money flows and asset tracking a new hot-topic around the proverbial postmodern water cooler. Two outstanding examples, that will be reviewed here, are Follow the Money, known as Bedrag in its original Danish form, and the Irish series Hidden Assets.

Follow the Money, whose first season was originally aired in Denmark in 2016, stretched to three seasons until 2019, and was sold to major broadcasters in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Portugal, Slovenia, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, countries in the former Yugoslavia including Serbia, the United States, Canada and Australia.

There may be case for this series being almost solely responsible for the emergence of the subgenre ‘financial crime’ becoming newly associated with action-packed TV fiction whereas it was once only the territory of large-scale cinematic productions. As we can see from the list above, international broadcasters are very aware that this show and others like it are guaranteed places on their most-watched and even most-anticipated offerings.

Hugely influential in the success of any TV crime drama is the factor of character-building and identification, which Follow the Money handles expertly, but it is also the deeply-research and up-to-date nature of how the industriousness and technical intricacy of these characters’ behaviours, that range hugely from multi-national substantiality projects to street-level drug dealing, require calculate money-laundering, cash-flow and asset-concealment processes that intrigue viewers.

Follow the Money also comes with a European subtlety that is not quite so well presented in Hidden Assets, which is currently running in its third season on Acorn Original—namely that the technical wizards, or even nerds, working for financial crime departments and investigative bodies do not become wholly embroiled in the physical chasing and shooting of their prey quite as much as Hollywoodite and American syndicated shows prefer to portray.

Hidden Assets, set in Ireland and based on that nation’s Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), a law enforcement agency that tackles illicit wealth, focuses on Belgium in the first two seasons and then Bilbao in Spain for the third, although people-trafficking and illegal immigration themes involving other countries are also examined.

Of most interest to the work CBIA is attempting to highlight here, and investigate at depth—specifically how fictional expression is reflecting developments in the field of financial crime investigation—is the fact that a number of countries have developed police bodies or set up legislation based on the CAB approach, which focuses on non-conviction based asset forfeiture using a civil standard of proof. [1]

Europol itself has a new CAB branch and recommended the model be used across Europe.[2] In France the Agency for the Recovery and Management of Seized and Confiscated Assets (AGRASC) was directly modeled on the CAB in 2010, while in New Zealand has an asset recovery unit with a similar structure and function to the CAB. Both the United Kingdom and the Cayman Islands have adopted proceeds of crime legislation that includes the concept of forfeiture in the absence of a criminal conviction, a key element of the Irish model: the UK has explored the Irish model as an option for dealing with oligarchs' assets.

Similar agencies in Northern Ireland, Australia, certain provinces of Canada, the United States, Italy, South Africa, and Bulgaria have been noted as having a similar non-conviction based asset forfeiture model, citing the Irish High Court decision behind the development of CAB as a precedent.

Sources

[1] An Garda Síochána, ‘Criminal Assets Bureau’, garda.ie.

[2] Cormac O’Keefe, ‘European Criminal Assets Bureau based on CAB’, Irish Examiner, 16 October 2009.