Cambodia has been identified as one of 12 jurisdictions that have “strategic anti-money laundering [AML] and counterterrorism financing [CFT] deficiency prevention.”
It has joined civil war-stricken countries such as Syria and Yemen, as well as the Bahamas, the foreign investment target of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global financial regulator based in Paris, France.
At the time, Cambodia had more than 100 casinos licensed by the ministry, according to a statement from a spokesman for the country’s economic finance government in May last year.
In a Friday announcement, the FATF said Cambodia had made “high-level political commitments to work with the FATF” this month with the FATF and another body, the Asia-Pacific Money Laundering Group (APG), to “fight anti-money laundering and financing of terrorist regimes and address relevant technical shortcomings.”
The 10-item plan drawn up with the country’s authorities includes “implementing risk-based supervision of real estate and casinos.”
This latest document indicates that not much progress has been made in Cambodia’s approach to some important anti-money laundering procedures since the mutual evaluation report between FATF and Cambodia was adopted in July 2017.
In September last year, the FATF’s first follow-up report on the assessment noted that “the main flaw is that Cambodia’s 2016 national risk assessment results were not provided to the reporting body.”
The FATF said in a September 2018 report that “major technical deficiencies” included no domestic legal means of handling money laundering other than the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] money laundering framework regarding drugs, corruption and terrorism-related crimes, no clear process for timely prioritization and execution of money laundering requests, no case management system to monitor requests, no provisions to maintain confidentiality of requests.
BY: 우리카지노탑