Tag Archives: civil asset forfeiture

Seychelles’ Case Sets Precedent for Asset Forfeiture

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U.K. Magistrate District Judge Sam Goozée ruled April 22 that the statute of limitations in a civil forfeiture starts to run only when the National Crime Agency learns of the existence of the assets and their illegal origin (here). As a result, he ordered the forfeiture of some $260,000 in the London bank account of Marinette Soumery, a secretary of Mukesh Valabhji, a former Seychelles government official charged with 11 counts of corruption, abuse of authority of office and money laundering (here).

In its forfeiture application, the NCA linked the money to companies and individuals associated with Valabhji and showed he and Soumery had taken elaborate steps to disguise its source. Because of the “highly suspicious” actions taken to hide where the funds came from, their links to Valabhji and associates, and Soumery and Valabhji’s inability to offer a credible explanation for their origin, the court ordered the money forfeited pursuant to the Proceeds of Crime Act, ruling:

there was “cogent and compelling” evidence giving “rise to an irresistible inference that the money in the account could only have been acquired through criminal activity.”

Statute of Limitation Defense

Soumery’s main defense was that however the funds were acquired, the PCA’s six-year statute of limitations, which runs from when “the property was obtained,” had expired in 2007, the date of the last deposit to the account.

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Fighting Corruption in U.S. Civil Asset Forfeiture Requires State-by-State Reforms

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Civil asset forfeiture is a judicial process through which law enforcement officials seize assets belonging to a person suspected of a crime. To be subject to forfeit, the assets in question must be either the proceeds of crime or were used to further that criminal activity, but in many jurisdictions, civil asset forfeiture does not require a criminal conviction, or even the formal filing of criminal charges, and the typical legal threshold is probable cause that the seized property is connected to criminal activity, rather than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard generally required for a criminal conviction.

In the international context, civil asset forfeiture is an integral component in the battle against corruption. Empowering law enforcement agencies to seize ill-gotten gains, without the need to first secure a criminal conviction, is one of the most effective methods of punishing corrupt actors and depriving them of the proceeds of their crimes. But civil asset forfeiture is not limited to seizing the proceeds of grand corruption, and in the United States, the civil asset forfeiture system, particularly at the state and local level, has itself has become a significant vector for corruption, albeit on a much smaller scale, with local officials taking advantage of lax oversight to use seized funds for their own personal benefit. For example, in March 2020, the Michigan State Attorney General’s Office brought charges against Macomb County Prosecutor Eric Smith, alleging that Smith and other county officials had misused forfeiture funds for things like personal home improvements (including a security system for Smith’s house and garden benches for several other employee’s homes), parties at country clubs, and campaign expenditures. Smith is far from the only public official accused of corruption relating to forfeiture funds. To take just a few other examples: State revenue investigators in Georgia used millions in forfeited assets to purchase travel and trinkets like engraved firearms; police officers in Hunt County, Texas awarded themselves personal bonuses of up to $26,000 from forfeiture accounts; and the District Attorney in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania leased a new personal car with forfeiture funds.

To be clear, there are concerns about the civil asset forfeiture system in the United States that run much deeper than the misappropriation of funds. Critics have vigorously attacked both the legal underpinnings of the civil forfeiture system as it currently exists in the U.S., as well the system’s implementation. But for the purposes of this post I want to bracket those larger issues to focus on the question of why the civil forfeiture systems at the state and local level in the United States pose especially high risks of corrupt misappropriation, and what might be done about this (assuming that the civil forfeiture system is here to stay, at least in the short term).

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