Money Laundering Act under microscope in Malawi
The Money Laundering, Proceeds of Serious Crimes and Terrorist Financing Act is currently under review and will soon be tabled in Parliament by the Ministry of Justice.
Revealing the development, acting director for Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), Atuweni-Tupochile Phiri said the review has been prompted by the revised 2012 recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
Phiri said the FATF is an international body which sets standards for all countries to follow and recommends that all the countries criminalise money laundering, terrorist financing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other related threats to the integrity of financial systems.
“The review of the Act will take on board issues proposed by a cross-section of stakeholders in order to help strengthen the National Anti-Money Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) regime,” said Phiri.
She also revealed that the review exercise is being funded by the World Bank through the Financial Sector Technical Assistance Project (FSTAP) which is under the Reserve Bank of Malawi (RBM).
The director further disclosed that there have been a series of meetings with various stakeholders in the North, Centre and Southern Regions of the country from August to October 2013 and that a consultant has been engaged and is coordinating the Act review process.
FIU is an independent central national agency with the mandate to receive financial information from financial institutions, analyse the information and then pass on the analysed information to as intelligence, to appropriate law enforcement agencies for investigations and possible prosecutions.
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