Legal and Confiscations

The Legal and Confiscations Division was established in April 2024, by merging the Financial Investigations Divisions and Legal Services team into one division. The Legal and Confiscations Division is focused on supporting and enabling operations by providing high quality legal and confiscation activities. This is delivered by the following workstreams:  

1. The Legal Services Team’s core function is providing legal services (including legal advice, litigation services and transactional legal work) to the Commission. Significant aspects of the work include conducting litigation, supporting the Commission’s criminal and financial investigations and confiscations, advising on legal compliance, and preparing and making applications for statutory warrants on behalf of the Commission.

2. Confiscations (previously known as the Financial Investigations Division) comprises a team of forensic accountants and financial analysts who primarily support the discharge of confiscating the proceeds of crime under the Criminal Assets Recovery Act 1990 (CAR Act). This includes suing people in the NSW Supreme Court to recover proceeds of crime derived from their criminal activity. The Confiscations Team specialises in tracing proceeds of crime and identifying assets held by, or on behalf of, people suspected of criminal misconduct, including proceeds and assets subjected to money laundering and other efforts to hide them. Confiscations comprises an Assessments Team, a Forensic Accounting Team, along with Litigation and Post-litigation Support and Enforcement Teams.

Financial inquiries are a valuable aid in criminal investigations and are sometimes deployed as the leading investigative strategy, given organised criminal groups are primarily motivated by money. Unlike other jurisdictions in Australia, the NSW Crime Commission conducts all aspects of the administration of the CAR Act, from the identification of appropriate persons against whom to commence proceedings through to, in the majority of cases, the recovery of the confiscation order. In recent years, Legal and Confiscations has successfully confiscated cash and assets worth many millions of dollars, returning the proceeds to the state of NSW.