Illicit enrichment generally refers to a situation in which a person has enjoyed some sort of wealth that cannot or has not been justified as coming from a legitimate source of income.
[1] The exact definitions for illicit enrichment, and the terminology used to describe the concept, vary considerably between international legal instruments and domestic laws.
Rather than just limiting the concept of illicit enrichment to include an increase in assets, legislators in dozens of countries around the world have defined illicit enrichment to also include unjustifiable increases in a person's ‘standard of living’ (e.g. Bhutan),[17] ‘train de vie’ (e.g. Senegal)[18] or ‘modo de vida’ (e.g. São Tomé and Príncipe).
An example of a criminal illicit enrichment law is the offence found in Section 10 of Hong Kong's Prevention of Briber Ordinance 1971.
These types of laws do not attract criminal punishments, but instead result in civil orders made against the relevant person to repay the value of the amount of wealth that they are unable to justify as coming from legal sources.
An example of this type of law is the “unexplained wealth declaration” mechanism contained in Western Australia's Criminal Property Confiscation Act.