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UK corporate crime weekly: contempt overhaul, anti-corruption drive, sanctions, CMA consumer powers, digital assets as property, AML/CTF supervision and new fraud reporting—11 December 2025

Published on: 11 December 2025

Published by a LexisNexis Corporate Crime expert
Legal News
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Article summary

In this issue:

  • Criminal procedure and evidence
  • Bribery, corruption, sanctions and export controls
  • Consumer protection and cartels
  • Cybercrime and data protection offences
  • Environmental offences
  • Financial services and pensions offences
  • Fraud, forgery, tax and theft offences
  • Health and safety and corporate manslaughter offences
  • Local authority prosecutions
  • Money laundering
  • Daily and weekly news alerts
  • New and updated content
  • Dates for your diary
  • Trackers
  • New Q&As
  • Useful information

Criminal procedure and evidence

From chaos to cohesion—a new architecture for contempt of court

The Law Commission’s Contempt of Court: Report (Part 1) on Liability, released on 17 November 2025, proposes scrapping the traditional civil/criminal contempt split and modernising contempt law through four new contempt categories. Christopher Gribbin and Molly Vann of Mishcon de Reya LLP assess this comprehensive redesign, featuring an updated general test for contempt, precise offence definitions and rebalanced rules on publication risk—most notably redefining when proceedings become ‘active’, moving the trigger from arrest to charge to align with contemporary privacy case law. Together, these measures reflect a proactive push for coherence and certainty, while tacitly accepting that the justice system’s information framework must evolve for a world of instant, distributed communication...

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