The European Union’s anti-money laundering system has been restructured to combat international economic crime and to reshape criminal finance. Today’s money laundering conspiracies are more complex and are pregnant with the proceeds of transnational crime. The more criminals succeed in introducing their ill-gotten gains from the informal to the formal economies, the more financial systems and anti-money laundering systems will be exposed to the serious and immediate threats of corruption and penetration. The reporting system and the exchange of information platforms enable competent authorities to rapidly trace, freeze and confiscate criminal and subversive assets, and to sanction wrongdoers. The harmonious operation of the reporting system and the exchange of information constitutes the central and suspicious eye of the global anti-money laundering regime. However, without the co-existence of the latter and their operational harmony, the central eye of the global anti-money laundering regime will become legally and operationally obsolete. Against that background, not all suspects and accused persons will be found guilty, that is, subject to not failing to reasonably and truthfully explain the source of their wealth to the competent authorities applying money laundering controls. On the one hand, prosecutors shoulder the burden of proving in court the class of crime as opposed to particularising the specific offence having generated the criminal proceeds traced and attacked by the anti-money laundering system. On the other hand, defendants rightly shoulder the burden of offering, to the satisfaction of the court, reasonable and truthful explanations about the sources of their wealth. In today’s globalised financial system, the shifting of responsibility to private sector reporters to disclose alleged offences through the submission of Suspicious Activity Reports; the confidential investigation of the financial affairs of suspects on the precondition that Suspicious Activity Reports are well founded so as to constitute the starting point for financial intelligence; and the statutory imposition of the obligation on suspects and accused persons to publicly explain the sources of unexplained wealth in their possession and control, cannot but constitute the prescribed tools for the prevention and control of economic crime, illicit enrichment and terrorist financing. After all, businesses and financial institutions have become more transparent and more accountable to financial regulators and to tax authorities than ever before as a result of the responsibility shifted to them by financial regulation.