ICA International Diploma in Anti Money Laundering
Money laundering is a process whereby criminals conceal the money coming from their criminal activity in order to reintegrate it as legitimate earnings. Steven M. D’Antuono, highlights in his Statement before the Senate the traditional “three-stage” money laundering as follows: “Money laundering generally involves three steps: placing illicit proceeds into the financial system; layering, or the separation of the criminal proceeds from their origin; and integration, or the use of apparently legitimate transactions to disguise the illicit proceeds”.[1] However, this traditional process remains general and presents some limitation due to the globalisation of the financial sphere and especially the type of sector involved. Nowadays, with the democratisation of payments online, the money can be laundered directly by placement due to the many alternatives and intermediaries of payments that exist online. It simply needs to be justified to the financial institutions So, the money launderers can easily skip one of these stages by using other means. Petrus C. van Duyne depicts in his book Money Laundering Policy, Fears and facts, a fourth stage at this process: “justification: the crime-money must be justified (this is the actual laundering in the narrow sense)”.[2] This is what leads the money launderers to use other methods which are directly supplied by the financial system. A technique such as an over invoice: A company ships under value material and rise voluntary the price over the value to a colluding partner by issuing a falsified invoice. The company receiving the goods will pay the invoice from criminal revenue and mixed with legit cash. The exchange appears legitimate due to the official documents supporting their trading activity. This example as many others shows that the stake for money launderers is to take advantage of the lack of control in the financial system in order to remain undetectable whatever the process used. Therefore, the stake to determine which process will profit the most to criminal activities is to look inside the irregularities of the international trade and financial system.
The procedure of the fourth round illustrates that two kind of follow-up can be made over the five years following the MER, a regular follow-up or an enhanced follow-up according to their compliance rate. [7] Once the MER is accepted, a list of success and vulnerabilities will be issued. In the further years, the country has to address the action taken to resolve its vulnerabilities through several updates. This method also includes an evaluation of the progress made by the government to react on the issue detected during the MER. The process takes five years to keep a constant evaluation through three reports on the progress made until the 5th year follow-up assessment. The primordial function of the MER is to create an international cooperation and involvement between jurisdictions to incorporate the FATF requirement and to identify their area of improvement. The effects allow governments to identify high risk jurisdiction and to lead the country to adopt or improve their policy thanks to the political weight of the FATF members. Furthermore, as the FATF president reports many aspects for the fight against ML and TF such as the multilateral legal assistance, the seizure of assets and forfeiture of properties, extradition require a partnership between governments in order to provide a successful support to the international financial investigations. [8]
Their reports must be conveyed to TRACFIN, the French Financial Intelligence Unit. Its goal is to collect, analyse and complete suspicious activity reports made by professional subject to the law and to pass these reports to the court in case of judicial prosecution. All professions quoted in this article have the duty to report all suspicious activity and can be sanctioned if they did not execute the protocol willingly. TRACFIN can transmit the STR to the following judicial authorities: prosecutors, magistrate but also to different police depending on the case or authorities. According to the article 561-35, the Authority of Financial Market (AMF) is also a competent authority for controlling financials investment and asset management.[12] In a resume in the French regime the article 561-1 and the following paragraphs is the main component that is regularly updated to transpose the European directives and apply the FATF requirements. Beyond fighting the money laundering and terrorism financing, these laws and actors help to maintain and reinforce a healthy economy by eradicate risk of inflation that can come from integration of criminal money into the economy. The fourth European directives[13] was implemented to create more transparency over the Non-profit Organisation and company. Now, they are obligated to declare the beneficial owner who possess twenty five percent or more of a company asset or an association. This directive was transposed in the French regime by the decree n°2017-1094 of the 12 June 2017 in relation to the beneficial ownership of entities which complete the article of law L561-2-2of the Monetary and the Financial Code. [14] More recently, after the terrorist attacks in Europe, the fifth European directive have been adopted on the 30 of May 2018. [15] It extends its regulations over entities which provides virtual currencies service, lower the thresholds for identifying prepaid card owners and make accessible to the public a register of beneficial owner and many other requirements that France as all European Union members will have to transpose in their internal legislation before the 1st of January 2020. We can highlight the fact that through the past events and constant technologic innovations in Finance, the French regime is in constant adaptation of its laws and development of its process to keep up to date its ML/FT regime at the highest level.
Therefore, a person subject to this recommendation must file an STR after reviewing elements on an account that raised suspicion in his mind such as an abnormal transaction volume, the refusal of a client to provide supporting documents. Thanks to his knowledge of the client and his activity and all the risks related to ML/TF, a person can complete an STR rationally on reasonable grounds of suspicion. A person guessing just based on inaccurate assumptions might be speculating on a doubt. Hence, the objective test of knowledge or suspicion must determine the transition from a subjective to an objective suspicion due to rational foundations and elements that raised red flag indicators.
However, a person that fails to make an STR while he knows about it and hides his suspicion; he commits a professional misconduct punishable by law. It means that he voluntarily remained in the ignorance of crucial elements to avoid reporting this transaction and can be accused of wilful blindness. This principle, used by law, means that a person has voluntarily remained in ignorance about elements to hide a criminal liability. This type of situation can have serious financial consequences and also on the reputation of a financial institution or even its closure. The New Zealand Society articles depicts the judgement sentence of the director of Pin Han Finance LTD in New Zealand.[16] He fails to verify the identity of 372 customers and miss to report 172 suspicious transactions. The default of due diligence and STR resulted in a fine of $ 5.29 million, 6 months in jail and 200 hours of general work for the director and therefore its liquidation.
In application of the law, for example the requirement to report a suspicious transaction that results to freeze an account or to have to inform the taxes.
In the case of a duty to inform the public, for example when a bank requests information on behalf of the government relating to a crime committed or when the bank considers that the client is involved in activities that do to the interests of the country a disservice.
When he has received foreign funds that should be seized following a sanction from a government.
In banking deontology, a bank may also share the account information of its client with another bank for its interest with the consent of its client. However, if an STR is carried out without rational grounds and this causes a direct financial loss to the customer. The customer may sue the institution if the report of the transaction is not founded, especially if the contract signed with the client does not provide a clause specifying the share of information under exceptional circumstances.
Recently, the FATF has also extended the Tax Evasion as a predicate offence of ML, which leads international pressure on offshore financial centre to have a compulsory process for reporting suspicion transaction. That has led the sacred secrecy of foreign financial institution in a turmoil. Face to the FATF members pressure they progressively includes the mandatory STR within their AML/CFT regimes.
On the one hand, an individual can create an account just by adding an email address and password, by entering the name, address and phone number. Since identity checks are only from a certain amount, the account can be created by usurping information. The source of financing that we add to this type of can varies from adding a bank account, prepaid or credit card. At this point, it is easy to use stolen financial data and identity and then make purchases without impunity or distribute the money received on other accounts to withdraw it later.
On the other hand, this type of account allows an excellent flexibility one can receive and send money in personal payments or for purchases/sales of goods or services in the whole world without almost any geographical restriction.
It is also straightforward to pass funds from one criminal activity from one continent to another by simulating payments between friends or sales on marketplaces such as eBay.
Seamus Hugues describes a prominent example of trial in the case of Mohamed Elshinawy.[18] He received $ 8700 between March and June 2015 from a UK company, Ibacstel Electronics, which had established front companies in Turkey and Bangladesh.
These transactions passed through PayPal by simulating the sale of printers on eBay’s online auction site. The transaction seems suspicious given the origin of the funds and its destination especially when we observe the location of subsidiaries in Bangladesh and Turkey not far from the Islamic state. The second red flag is that it would make more sense for profit that the business specialised in IT sells to a US consumer according to the volume of payment.
This situation may be subject to verification, but international transactions of this type are still very common with online payment services.
The third red flag is that this amount received has been divided into four payments spaced in time of fifteen days in order to make think of a stable business relationship over time.
In fact, this individual has received funds by the intermediary of Ibacstel Electronics which carried out these transactions on behalf of ISIS members to finance a terrorist attack on US soil. In consequences, he was arrested by the FBI on December 11, 2015, for terrorism charges. Other person to person payment services were also used such as Western Union and an attempted transaction via Money Gram.
https://www.bis.org/bcbs/publ/d452.pdf
https://www.fbi.gov/scams-and-safety/common-fraud-schemes
https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_the_dangers_of_willful_blindness#t-5782
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2015/849/oj
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32018L0843
http://www.fatf-gafi.org/about/membersandobservers/
http://www.petrusvanduyne.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Witwassen-Fears-and-Facts.pdf
https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/guide_blanchiment.pdf
http://www.39essex.com/docs/articles/disclosure_article_for_butterwords.pdf
https://www.lawfareblog.com/only-islamic-state-funded-plot-us- curious-case-mohamed-elshinawy
https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/combating-money-laundering-and-other-forms-of-illicit-finance
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