CLARS Law and Business Seminar: Expansion of Regulation: New Sectors, New Responsibilities
Australia and the United Kingdom are rapidly expanding regulatory regimes, placing new monitoring and compliance obligations on businesses and boards. This CLARS Law and Business Seminar brings these developments into conversation to examine what they mean in practice for accountability, governance and regulatory risk. Join us for a fascinating discussion of how far these obligations are reaching, and why they matter.
For example, this year marks Australia’s greatest‑ever expansion of financial crime rules. From March 2026, almost 100,000 businesses across Australia are newly subject to anti‑money laundering (AML), counter‑terrorist financing (CTF) and counter‑proliferation financing (CPF) obligations. Real estate agents, accountants and even legal practitioners will now have to monitor their customers and report suspicious activities to the government, extending obligations that banks and casinos have been subject to for many years. Despite its ongoing expansion, there is abiding uncertainty about the societal value of AML/CTF/CPF regulation. Do the benefits justify the ever‑ballooning costs, and what is this regulatory scheme meant to achieve in any event?
Parallel developments in the United Kingdom raise similar questions about the expanding scope and limits of corporate monitoring obligations. A number of recent developments have foregrounded and expanded the monitoring role of UK boards. The UK Corporate Governance Code stipulates that boards are responsible for establishing, maintaining and monitoring effective risk management and internal control frameworks, requires boards to carry out an annual review of the effectiveness of these controls, and from 2027 boards will be required to make a declaration of their effectiveness. Meanwhile, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 has introduced a wide‑ranging corporate failure to prevent fraud offence for large companies. Companies have a defence if they possess reasonable fraud‑prevention measures, which raises the risk of directors facing claims for breaching their duty of care to the company if they fail to take reasonable steps to ensure these systems are in place, and to monitor their effectiveness.
There are a number of challenges facing such actions, however, not least that the UK courts have recently indicated that the care required of directors under section 174 of the Companies Act 2006 is the same as that established by nineteenth‑century case law. That is, directors will only be liable if they act irrationally, or as “no reasonable director” would. This, at least, is the position in relation to challenges to directors’ decisions; the position in relation to monitoring obligations is less clear, and will be the focus of discussion.
Event Details
Expansion of Regulation: New Sectors, New Responsibilities
When: Thursday 28 May 2026
Time: 5pm - 7pm AEST
Refreshments provided with the seminar commencing at 5:30pm
Campus: Monash Conference Centre
Level 7, 30 Collins Street, Melbourne
If you missed a recent event, the sessions are made available to watch on the CLARS Video Portal.
This Monash Law faculty seminar is presented in partnership with the Centre for Commercial Law and Regulatory Studies (CLARS).
Speakers
Professor Joan Loughrey, Dean of Law, Queen’s University Belfast
Monash Law visiting scholar, Professor Joan Loughrey is a Professor of Corporate Law and former Dean of the School of Law at Queen’s University Belfast and prior to that, former Dean of the School of Law of the University of Leeds. After obtaining her degree in Jurisprudence from Somerville College, Oxford University, she qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales and then in Hong Kong.
Her research interests are in corporate law and corporate governance-particularly the regulation of directors and enforcement of directors' duties, shareholder litigation, and the regulation of the legal profession. She has published widely in these areas in international peer reviewed journals and her monograph, Corporate Lawyers and Corporate Governance, was published by Cambridge University Press.
Professor Loughrey has received invitations to speak and been a visitor around the world including Georgetown University, the University of Cambridge, UCL, University of Sydney, Melbourne University, Monash, Adelaide, University of Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong, China University of Political Science and Law, Singapore Management University, University of Indonesia and Thammasat University to name some.
She is the Vice President of the Society of Legal Scholars, and incoming President in September 2026. Founded in 1908, this is the principal representative body for legal academics in the UK. She is also a General Editor of the Journal of Corporate Law Studies, a leading Q1 international journal in corporate law.
In 2023 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, an award that recognises distinguished individuals for their significant contributions to the social sciences.
Visit the Academic Visitors Calendar for more information about collaborators and visitors to Monash Law.
Associate Professor Anton Moiseienko, Research Director, Australian National University
Dr Anton Moiseienko is an Associate Professor of Law and Research Director at the Australian National University Law School. He is the author of Doing Business with Criminals (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and Corruption and Targeted Sanctions (Brill, 2019). He has also co-edited four books on transnational crime and published in the world’s leading law journals.
Anton gave testimony to Australia's Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement; Australian Senate's Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade; UK House of Commons' International Trade Committee; Canada's Commission of Inquiry into Money Laundering in British Columbia (Cullen Commission); and Legal Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe – all of which adopted his recommendations.
He is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Finance and Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the UK's leading defence think tank; Senior Research Affiliate at Singapore Management University's Centre for Digital Law; Advisor at Transparency International Australia; and member of the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Criminology, Journal of Financial Crime and Journal of Money Laundering Control.
Chair
Professor Jennifer Hill, CLARS Director, Faculty of Law, Monash University
Professor Jennifer Hill is the Inaugural Bob Baxt AO Chair of Corporate and Commercial Law and Director of CLARS. Her scholarship on comparative corporate law and governance is widely cited in judicial decisions and academic literature in Australia, the United States, Europe and Asia.
Professor Hill has received several ARC Discovery grants and held visiting teaching and research positions at leading international institutions, including Cambridge University; Cornell; NYU; University of Virginia, and Vanderbilt University. She is a Research Member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Finance and EU Law (EUSFiL), University of Genoa, a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.