Ben Cooper

This includes advice on money laundering, sanctions, tax evasion, bribery and corruption, terrorist proliferation financing, corporate ethics, asset tracing, fraud, complex investigations and criminal proceedings.

Ben also has extensive experience assisting clients to develop, implement and operate global economic crime compliance programmes utilising his experience in senior compliance roles for HSBC, Global Head of Financial Crime Functions and Global Head of AB&C.

Ben also worked for the Asset Recovery Agency and Serious Organised Crime Agency (now the National Crime Agency) and so is uniquely placed to advise clients on handling enquiries and investigations from law enforcement agencies.

Jurisdiction: England & Wales

• Advice to various banks on taking the risk-based decision to exit customers for financial crime reasons and what information can be provided to the customer to avoid the offence of tipping off.
• Designed an entire economic crime compliance programme for a Middle Eastern client. This covered the entire economic crime sphere including sanctions, ethics, third party risk, whistleblowing and investigations. This included drafting the relevant policies, communications, training and advising on the implementation strategy.
• Led HSBC's global annual bribery and corruption risk assessment, including assessing the control environment effectiveness and providing effective challenge to risk and control owners.
• Designed, developed and rolled out an electronic gifts, entertainment and charitable giving workflow tool and register to all 64 countries across the HSBC Group.
• Ultimate point of escalation for bribery and corruption advice across the HSBC Group (including all 230,000 staff) and the Group Chairman, CEO and Board.