Search Results for: Venezuelan

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.…

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).…

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.…

Money launderers continue to develop layering techniques to insert criminal proceeds into legitimate financial transactions, and these typologies are becoming increasingly varied.

‘Cuckoo smurfing’ is one new technique attracting attention, for instance, said a briefing note from Australian FIU Austrac (1).…

The suspension for alleged corruption by senior officials at a financial intelligence unit (FIU), the cornerstone of any jurisdiction’s AML work, would be shocking. But if those suspensions were at the FIU of the world’s only purely theocratic state, such reports would sound like the work of thriller fiction.…

IT has been another subdued year for the beauty and personal care product market in Latin America, as the region’s economy underperforms yet again after six years of deceleration (and in some countries outright recession), keeping a lid on sales growth. …

BANKS worldwide are having to take increasing care lest they be fined for violating sanctions and not having adequate regulatory compliance regimes in place. With the USA expanding sanctions against Venezuela and Iran, financial institutions need to not only have adequate screening software but anticipate potential new regulations and that regulators will be pouring over past activities.…

In a significant ramp up of its pressure on the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the United States Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Monday (January 28) announced the imposition of new sanctions against the country’s state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA (PdVSA).…

THE DUTCH Caribbean continues to have a weak reputation for fighting money laundering, and to a lesser extent terror financing, with the US 2017 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) highlighting weaknesses in its three autonomous jurisdictions. See https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/268024.pdf

Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten are ‘countries’ within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with their own prime ministers, while less populous islands Bonaire, St Eustatius (Statia) and Saba are municipalities, with fewer powers vested in their island councils, and the Dutch government being responsible for enforcing international anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) norms.…

AML compliance departments are having to take an increasingly close look at any transactions involving Venezuela, as its authoritarian government attracts increasingly large numbers of international sanctions.

The European Union (EU) in June sanctioned 11 senior Venezuelan officials following the May re-election of President Nicolas Maduro in polls that the EU said were “neither free nor fair and…lacked any credibility…”

The sanctions – see https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32018D0901&from=EN…