2 Ocak 2011 Pazar

AML COMPLIANCE OVERVIEW

In the post-9/11 era, Anti Money Laundering (AML) legislation and compliance to
AML requirements have become key focus areas for banks, law firms, asset
management firms, auditors and similar regulated service providers. World-Check,
the leading global AML intelligence solution, provides an overview of AML
compliance and the laws underlying this area of regulatory
compliance.

According to the latest KPMG Global Anti Money Laundering
Survey, published in 2007, a staggering US$ 1 trillion per year is being
laundered by financial criminals, drugs dealers and arms traffickers worldwide.
With this much laundered money in the wrong hands, criminal syndicates are able
to expand their operations, resulting in more violence, higher levels of
addiction and a range of related socio-economic problems throughout the
world.

Laundered money is also known to finance highly coordinated
international terrorist activities; a phenomenon that poses a clear and present
danger to worldwide political and economic stability.

As such, Anti Money
Laundering and the Combating of Terrorist Financing (CTF) can only be treated as
pressing objectives of global concern. A sharp worldwide increase in the amount
of wealth in private hands, combined with the multinational expansion of leading
financial institutions, further necessitated the expansion of supranational
legislation and law enforcement structures to combat money laundering and
related financial crimes.



History of Anti Money Laundering
Compliance Laws

Although AML compliance has been accentuated by recent
global developments, it is by no means a new regulatory issue. Modern Anti Money
Laundering regulations are to a large extent informed by the earlier experiences
of the Swiss banking community, where financial scandals involving the likes of
Nigeria’s General Sani Abacha and the Philippines’ Marcos family resulted in
extremely bad publicity for the institutions involved.


The arrival
of the new millennium was marred by a series of coordinated acts of terrorism
and a number of massive corporate scandals involving the likes of Enron and
Riggs formerly a leading American financial institution.

These events
highlighted the fact that money laundering had taken on epic proportions over
time, and that the proliferation of new technologies and communication platforms
had created countless opportunities for fraud, money laundering and other elicit
financial activities. They also accentuated the need to “know your customers”,
and led to the creation and implementation of a range of KYC and AML laws aimed
at preventing financial criminals from accessing and abusing financial
systems.

Given the fact that the greatest majority of criminal activities
generating profits only start generating a traceable paper trail once funds are
introduced into the financial system, it was deemed necessary to approach AML
compliance and law enforcement in a way that clamped down on abuses of the
world’s official banking and financial systems. To this end, regulatory,
legislative and law enforcement agencies set out to create an AML compliance
framework and cross-border law enforcement regime aimed at holding financial
institutions accountable for their clients’ transactional activities

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