New Zealand's Organised Crime and Anti‐Corruption Legislation Bill is currently being considered by the country's Law and Order Select Committee.

The bill, which proposes amendments to 12 different Acts, is an omnibus Bill and includes amendments to the AML/CFT Act to introduce reporting for international transactions (with a threshold of $1,000) and for large cash transactions (with a threshold of $10,000).

The bill also aims to improve New Zealand's ability to collaborate with international efforts to disrupt organised crime. The Select Committee was due to report back on 5 May and has done. Its opinions are as follows.

• The current penalty for foreign bribery prescribed in the Crimes Act 1961 is a maximum term of 7 years' imprisonment. Although courts are able to impose a
• fine as an alternative to imprisonment, they are not able to impose both; the committee wants them to be able to do so. Its aim here is to please the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
• Money-laundering acts committed outside New Zealand are also a matter of contention. The committee wants Parliament to amend clause 15 to ensure that where New Zealand exercises extraterritorial jurisdiction over an offence, it can be a predicate offence for money laundering regardless of whether that conduct is criminalised in the jurisdiction in which it took place.
• It also wants to provide some unnamed person or body with a regulation-making power to exempt certain reporting entities involved in an international wire transfer from the prescribed transaction reporting requirements.
• It wants to remove the requirement that individual employees should be named in prescribed transaction reports from clause 23 of the bill. Such information, it feels, carries no intelligence value.
• It recommends an amendment to the bill to make any failure to report a prescribed transaction a "civil liability act."
• It wants Parliament to amend clause 42 to allow the registration of foreign restraining orders to be extended (more than once if necessary) for a year upon application to "the court" (a mysterious entity to which it refers throughout the document, with no attempt to identify it) and to not be limited to extradition cases. Foreign states, it notes, may require more than three years to obtain a forfeiture order in cases other than extradition proceedings.
• As it stands, New Zealand's law does not allow police to take photographs of, or fingerprints from, people who are arrested under the Extradition Act 1999. The committee wants to remedy that.

Facilitation payments

Members of the committee who belong to the Green Party hold the view that the bill "is a missed opportunity to address the issue of facilitation payments, which will still be excepted from the foreign bribery offence under section 105C(3) of the Crimes Act 1961." Facilitation payments, an American idea, are payments that the briber makes to a foreign official to 'jolly him along' in the execution of something that is already part of his job-description. This is held in US (and, evidently, New Zealand) law as less corrupt than other examples of bribing. This is likely to continue as the Ministry of Justice has said that these payments do not yield an “undue advantage.”