Annotation

Where citizens report that their money was solicited on a promise of investment returns, the police routinely decline to open a criminal case on the ground that the parties are in a purely contractual relationship. The article argues that this reasoning endures not merely because of poor practice, but because the law does not spell out how far a pre-investigation inquiry must go: the matters to be established before a case is opened are inferred from Articles 24, 140, 144, 145 and 148 of the Criminal Procedure Code rather than expressly listed, leaving the adequacy of an inquiry without a formal benchmark. The author submits that commercial risk is to be distinguished from fraudulent intent by reference to the recipient’s actual financial and operational capacity when the money was taken, rather than by the subsequent failure to repay, and that outward infrastructure or partial payouts cannot by themselves separate fraud from the offence of operating a fund-raising scheme. The article identifies which matters can genuinely be established under Part 1 of Article 144 and which are barred by banking secrecy, and proposes a new Part 1.3 of Article 144 together with a set of guidelines for inquiries.