Search Results for: Venezuela

Venezuela, whose July presidential election has been contested by its political opposition as fraudulent, is facing an increase in financial controls having been grey listed by FATF this June (2024). This was over failures to respond to the global body’s requests for improvements in AML/CFT.…

The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has approved priorities for the upcoming Mexican presidency of the global AML/CFT body, from July 1 (2024) to June 2026, including launching the fifth mutual evaluation assessment (MER) round. Other key goals include boosting financial inclusion; strengthening the cohesion of AML/CFT global network (member states and regional FATF-style bodies); asset recovery; beneficial ownership; virtual assets; and redoubling efforts on preventing terrorist and proliferation financing (1).…

Sint Maarten, an autonomous country within the Dutch Caribbean, has been struggling to strengthen its AML/CFT system, although it has made tangible progress. Sint Maarten, which comprises the southern third of the island of St Martin in the north-east Caribbean, which it shares with the French collectivity of Saint Martin, had 12 follow up reports for its latest third mutual evaluation round by the Caribbean Financial Action Task Force (CFATF) (1).…

Transparency International’s 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) (1) released on Tuesday (January 30) has concluded 122 of 180 countries worldwide scored below 50 on perceived levels of public sector corruption from 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). This number shows how “corruption levels remain stagnant globally” – as the same number was reported last year (2022).…

Trade regulators for the European Union (EU) and US markets are trying to set a higher bar for multinational brands on labour rights and environmental protections, but participants in the Cambodian garment and footwear sector are not anticipating any major shifts in their industry’s standards, at least not for a while.…

International AML/CFT rules and guidance have been designed to help governments crack down on criminals and terrorists, but there are few guiderails to prevent states from abusing these tools to target political opponents. Given the membership of FATF and FATF-style regional bodies, and the Egmont Group of FIUs is practically universal, that means AML/CFT systems are available to authoritarian states.…

Political branding can encourage or deter clothing sales, say marketing experts, with the risks and rewards growing where political polarisation intensifies. The key US market is certainly a case in point. Research published in the January-February 2023 issue of the academic journal Marketing Science, by the US-based Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, concluded that, following Donald Trump’s presidential electoral victory in 2016, political polarisation was increasingly extended to consumers’ preferences.…

Switzerland-based multinational mining and energy group Glencore will pay almost USD1.2 billion in fines and penalties to the US, UK and Brazil for corrupt and dishonest trading, including bribing African officials and illicitly manipulating oil market prices.

With prosecutorial investigations continuing in the Netherlands and Switzerland, Glencore said yesterday (Tuesday 24/5) that it would set aside USD1.5 billion to settle all cases relating to this malpractice.…

A former DEA agent who laundered money undercover to attack the Medellín and Cali cartels has called for a root-and-branch reform of AML, so that its vast resources target the most suspicious transactions and the professional launderers who facilitate them. Speaking to MLB, Robert Mazur, who offered ML services to drug kingpins such as Pablo Escobar in the 1980s and 1990s to undermine their criminal networks, said that many laundering techniques used then are still in use today.…

INTRODUCTION

Financial crime is a minefield for the international textile and clothing industry. With extended international supply chains extending into jurisdictions where the rule of law and a reliable independent judiciary may have a weak hold, if they exist at all, textile and clothing brands and manufacturers must take care.…