The Court of Appeal quashed the defendant’s conviction for money laundering under section 328 of the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002: ‘In our view the natural and ordinary meaning of section 328(1) is that the arrangement to which it refers must be one which relates to property which is criminal property at the time when the arrangement begins to operate on it. To say that it extends to property which was originally legitimate but became criminal only as a result of carrying out the arrangement is to stretch the language of the section beyond its proper limits. An arrangement relating to property which has an independent criminal object may, when carried out, render the subject matter criminal property, but it cannot properly be said that the arrangement applied to property that was already criminal property at the time it began to operate on it.’ (Paragraph 19). Practitioners will therefore need to consider carefully whether the circumstances they are considering involve laundering of the proceeds of crime, or me
rely the initial crime itself.

http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Crim/2010/1925.html