SYED SADDIQ BIN SYED ABDUL RAHMAN v Pendakwa Raya

Case Significance

Illustrates that AMLA money-laundering convictions under section 4(1)(b), resting on predicate Penal Code offences, cannot stand where the trial court failed to consider the defence and the underlying convictions are found unsafe.

This Court of Appeal decision, the third of three companion appeals heard and decided together, concerns an appeal against convictions on two charges under the Anti-Money Laundering, Anti-Terrorism Financing and Proceeds of Unlawful Activities Act 2001 (AMLA) and two charges under the Penal Code. The AMLA charges were laid under section 4(1)(b) and rested on the premise that the moneys the appellant was said to have dealt with were proceeds of unlawful activity — namely the criminal breach of trust and dishonest misappropriation alleged in the Penal Code charges. A live issue was whether there was a prima facie case on the AMLA charges given the way those charges were framed and their dependence on the predicate Penal Code offences. The appeal also raised whether the High Court judge had erred in failing to decide that no offence was made out even on unrebutted prosecution evidence and whether the credibility of the main prosecution witnesses had been assessed. The Court of Appeal held that the trial judge had failed to consider the appellant's defence — a duty owed however weak that defence — and that this was a serious non-direction amounting to a misdirection warranting appellate intervention. Assessing the whole of the record, the Court unanimously found the convictions on all the charges, including the AMLA charges, to be unsafe. It allowed the appeals, set aside the convictions and sentences, and acquitted and discharged the appellant of all charges. The judgment illustrates that money-laundering charges dependent on predicate offences fall away when the convictions underpinning them are found unsafe, and that a failure to consider the defence taints the whole of the prosecution. The Court noted that where the predicate offences supplying the essential element of proceeds of unlawful activity are themselves not soundly established, the money-laundering charges built upon them cannot independently sustain a conviction, so that the fate of the AMLA charges necessarily followed that of the underlying Penal Code charges.