D2.2: Set of use cases and scenarios

Title: CASE STUDY: THE CITY PA

In the spring of 2004, Joyti De-Laurey, a personal assistant at Goldman Sachs in London, was convicted of stealing £4.3m from her bosses, through fraud and forgery, and laundering the proceeds of her crime with the help of her mother and her husband (a 50-year-old former chauffeur). 

De-Laurey’s gross salary with bonuses amounted to £42,000 a year. Yet, during her time at Goldman Sachs, she acquired, among other things, a £750,000 seafront villa in Cyprus, £500,000 worth of furniture, £400,000 in jewellery, several top of the range cars and a £150,000 power boat. The gap between her known source of income – a socio-demographic characteristic - and her exhibited lifestyle was enormous and led to alarms being raised by several financial institutions. This picture was compounded when, in court, it was revealed that De-Laurey was planning to start a new life with her family in Cyprus, and she had described herself on a school registration form as a banker – an indication of the benefit sought with the behaviour pursued. The string of cheques with forged signatures being deposited into her account and, later, the transfer to Cyprus was considered suspicious behaviour. Similarly, the pattern of transfers between De-Laurey’s bank accounts and those of her husband and mother implicated them in the associated money laundering charges.

The components of identity were used in order to identify De-Laurey and her associates as money launderers. The construction of someone else’s identity is, however, not an objective process; rather it is one subject to the prejudices and judgement of those who engage in the identity construction exercise. Several suspicious transaction reports were filed against De-Laurey, yet the case of her being a money launderer took some time to build because, in the words of a financial investigator interviewed by the authors, she “did not fit the typical money launderer profile: man, white, 40 years old”.