Search Results for: Caribbean

After completing the technical testing required, central America’s largest apparel factory is about to open in Honduras, producing sportswear for major brands such as Nike or Under Armour, an executive informed just-style.
La Arena, the Tegra Global-owned industrial park in San Pedro Sula, in the country’s north, will receive around 100 employees during the last week of August – its inauguration was delayed from January because of the Covid-19 pandemic.…

THE EUROPEAN Commission in June (2021) signalled it was running out of patience with Malta and Cyprus over their ‘golden passport’ schemes which allow people investing in these small island nations to effectively buy citizenship. The European Union (EU) executive has long warned that such policies contain significant ML risks, releasing a detailed report in 2019 that highlighted concerns that governments failed to properly screen the source of funds used to gain golden passports.…

The narcotics trade was a prime motivator to enact global anti-money laundering regulations to curb dirty money flows. Over 30 years later, drug trafficking is still considered the largest transnational crime by international law enforcement agencies. It is worth an estimated USD344 billion-a-year, according to Interpol, followed by counterfeiting crimes (USD288 billion) and human trafficking (USD157 billion).…

The world’s anti-money laundering/combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) system has come a long way since the G7 group of nations decided to launch the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in July 1989. But Australian researchers have claimed AML/CFT compliance costs USD300 billion and only nets USD3 billion of an estimated USD3 trillion in criminal funds generated annually (a 0.1% success rate).…

THE WIDE diversity of AML laws worldwide can complicate the enforcement of AML/CFT extradition proceedings.

Financial Action Task Force (FATF) recommendations 37 and 39 say that governments should be prepared to extradite money launderers (and terrorist financiers) to another country if they both criminalise the underlying predicate offence.…

Anti-money laundering specialists may be focusing on how crypto-currencies and online transactions pose an increasing ML/TF risk, especially with Covid-19 encouraging ecommerce, but the reality is that cash remains the money launderers’ best instrument for moving dirty money.

That is the conclusion of Gabriel Hidalgo, a managing director at risk specialists K2 Integrity, in New York: “Cash is king for ML; it continues to be king; and on the majority of levels, illicit actors will continue to use cash,” he said.…

THE REPUTATION of the Caribbean’s major cigar production centres – Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua – has dominated global markets for years. But the entire region’s balmy and moist climate and rich soils are ideal for growing cigar wrapper and filler leaf.…

THE EUROPEAN Union’s (EU) international food and drink trade has withstood the challenges of Covid-19, with figures for the first eight months of 2020 valuing EU exports (excluding the UK) at EUR119 billion, up 1.2% compared to January-August 2019. Imports also rose slightly to EUR81.6 billion (up 0.8%).…

THE INTERNATIONAL Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) is promoting digital technologies within air traffic management systems to shore up the efficiency of a global civil aviation sector severely disrupted by Covid-19. But there is doubt about whether these investments will be made by a pandemic-hit industry.…

TEXT fraud is maybe more dangerous that email fraud, given the tendency for mobile phone users to respond to texts swiftly and without careful thought, cyber-security experts warn.

The Covid-19 pandemic has also created opportunities for fraudsters using texts and messaging services such as WhatsApp to launch fishing and other attacks on the unwary.…