Law of 12 December 2025 Amending Article 506-1 of the Criminal Code on Money Laundering

Article 506-1 of the Criminal Code has been given a makeover.

So, what does this actually change?

Money laundering before the Law of 12 December 2025

One of the constituent elements of the money laundering offence concerned the predicate offence.

A predicate offence is the crime or misdemeanour from which the laundered funds originate.

Before the legislative amendment, the funds had to originate from one of the offences expressly listed in Article 506-1 as predicate offences.

Article 506-1 expressly referred to certain offences such as fraud, corruption and drug trafficking and, more generally, any offence punishable by a custodial sentence with a minimum term exceeding six months.

The list of predicate offences continued to expand over successive legislative amendments.

One of the questions that arose, particularly in relation to conduct dating back several years, was whether the predicate offence was included in Article 506-1 at the time the relevant acts were committed.

If the funds did not originate from one of the offences referred to in Article 506-1, the offence of money laundering was not established.

This did not necessarily mean that no prosecution was possible, since possession of the proceeds of an offence could be prosecuted as handling stolen property under Article 505 of the Criminal Code.

The exhaustive list of predicate offences has been abolished

All crimes and misdemeanours now fall within the scope of Article 506-1 of the Criminal Code.

It is now sufficient for the funds to originate from a crime or misdemeanour for the money laundering offence to be capable of being established.

This first raises two questions:

• What is a misdemeanour?
• What is a crime?

What is a misdemeanour?

An offence punishable by a correctional penalty, namely:

• Imprisonment;
• A fine;
• Special confiscation;
• Deprivation of certain civil and political rights;
• Closure of a business or establishment;
• Publication or posting, at the convicted person’s expense, of the judgment or an extract from the conviction;
• Prohibition from carrying out certain professional or social activities (Law of 6 October 2009);
• Prohibition from driving certain vehicles;
• Alternative penalties provided for in Articles 21 and 22.

What is a crime?

A crime may be punishable by:

• Life imprisonment or a fixed-term sentence of imprisonment;
• A fine;
• Special confiscation;
• Deprivation of titles, ranks, public duties, positions and offices;
• Deprivation of certain civil and political rights;
• Closure of a business or establishment;
• Publication or posting, at the convicted person’s expense, of the judgment or an extract from the conviction;
• Prohibition from carrying out certain professional or social activities.

The law is now more severe, as it applies to a greater number of offences.

Accordingly, it only applies to offences committed from the date of its entry into force, 19 December 2025, pursuant to the principle of non-retroactivity of a more severe criminal law under Article 2 of the Criminal Code.

For acts committed before that date, it remains necessary to determine whether, at the time they were committed, they constituted a predicate offence covered by the former version of Article 506-1 of the Criminal Code.

In light of this extension of Article 506-1, one question remains: whether Article 505 on handling stolen property should itself now be revised, as this reform appears to have significantly reduced its scope.

➡️ For any questions relating to criminal law, please contact Fanny Gilliers and Bastien Desjardins.