Combating Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism in Latvia

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Every country has a duty to combat money laundering and to prevent terrorist financing or any other threats that can compromise the integrity of the international financial system. A robust and resilient anti-money laundering and combating of terrorism financing (AML/CFT) regime is the first step towards being able to implement effective legal, regulatory and operational measures.

This document describes recommendations made by the OECD in relation to Latvia’s efforts to strengthen its AML/CFT supervisory and control systems.
Combating-Money-Laundering-and-the-Financing-of-Terrorism-in-Latvia-Overview

Terrorfinancing- dailytimes

 

Why Women Make Great Whistleblowers

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Historically, women have been the ones to shed light on some of the most egregious cases of fraud and waste in government, corporations and other organizations. ‘Women Whistleblowers’ the website and social media campaign features many of these courageous women and has garnered the attention of the online community as a whole. On Facebook alone, over 63,000 people have liked the Women Whistleblowers page, and many others engage with the campaign via Twitter and Instagram. ..Why Women Make Great Whistleblowers


Whistleblowing Women
Whistleblower-Netzwerk E.V.

Take Action against Terrorist Financing

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Current Efforts by the FATF to Monitor and Take Action against Terrorist Financing
 

The FATF notes with grave concern and condemns the violent terrorist attack last week that killed at least 40 Indian security forces in Pulwama in the State of Jammu and Kashmir.  From this and other recent attacks on schools in Afghanistan and Nigeria, hotels in Kenya, houses of worship in Indonesia, courthouses in Turkey and concerts and train stations in Europe, terrorism continues to threaten societies and citizens around the world. While all these attacks kill, maim, and inspire fear, they cannot occur without money and the means to move funds between terrorist supporters.

This vulnerability makes identifying terrorists’ financial flows and depriving them of funds a crucial tool in disrupting terrorist attacks before they even occur. Financial intelligence helps governments around the world to map out the financial networks of terrorists and has played a critical role in identifying and disrupting foreign terrorist fighter facilitation and other terrorist networks in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. Further, using financial and law enforcement tools to cut off terrorists from their sources of revenue weakens the networks and infrastructure needed for these groups to accomplish their destructive goals.

The changing nature of the threats posed by ISIL, AQ and affiliates also demonstrate how the risks affecting different jurisdictions around the world continue to change. In order to help jurisdictions better identify and understand the nature of the risks that are affecting them, and how they are developing over time, the FATF will finalise and publish guidance on TF Risk Assessments in June. The current round of assessments of countries implementation of the FATF Standards has demonstrated that significant vulnerabilities remain in countries CFT regimes. Nearly two-thirds of countries assessed are still not taking effective action to investigate and prosecute terrorist financing, and 80% are not effective in relation to targeted financial sanctions. Under the US Presidency, the FATF will hold a workshop to improve countries capacity to investigate and prosecute terrorist financing. This workshop will build on FATF’s efforts to ensure that the criminal offence of terrorist financing is being aggressively pursued by all jurisdictions. 

The FATF and its global Standards to counter the financing of terrorism (CFT) play a central role in this effort. ….FATF-Against Terrorist Financing

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The Troika Laundromat

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One of the largest leaks of banking records and related documents ever reveals an $8.8 billion network of offshore companies that allowed corrupt politicians and criminals to secretly launder money and hide assets abroad. Here’s the
#TroikaLaundromat
OCCRP Troika Laundromat …

While governments and citizens of Eastern Europe were struggling with the recent financial crisis and trying to borrow money from international financial institutions, billions of euros circulated in the region in an illegal, parallel, system that enriched organized crime figures and corrupt politicians.The system is built on hundreds, maybe thousands, of ever-morphing phantom companies…..Proxy-Platform

What Is The ‘Troika Laundromat’ And How Did It Work?

What is the ‘Troika Laundromat’?
How did it work?
How much money was involved?
Are there examples?……TheGuardian

Black Women to Boost Diversity in Tech, Media, and Finance

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5 important efforts by black women to boost diversity in tech, media, and finance.

Across industries, from tech to media and finance, statistics show people of color lack representation.

Brittney Oliver reports: Black Americans have a higher unemployment rate than other racial groups, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and much has been written about how that inequality goes straight up the ladder to the boardroom. Across industries, from tech to media and finance, statistics show people of color lack representation. Here are five initiatives, by six black women, that are attempting to address those employment gaps–and connect people of color with jobs….Fastcompany

Special Committee against Money Laundering and Tax Evasion

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Hearing of the European Parliament on Malta / 17 Black

For more than two years a corruption scandal has been smouldering in Malta, centred around two of Prime Minister Joseph Muscat’s closest confidants: His Chief of Staff Keith Schembri and Tourism Minister Konrad Mizzi. Several leaks and the Daphne Project of investigative journalists revealed that Schembri’s secret shell company was to receive a million-dollar sum from a company called „17 Black“. To date, Schembri has not been able to refute this suspicion.

The first part of the hearing of the Special Committee of the European Parliament on Monday evening will be an exchange of views with the Maltese Minister of Justice, Owen Bonnici. The second part will feature Matthew Caruana Galizia, son of Daphne Caruana Galizia, and a journalist from the Daphne project. The Daphne Project is an association of journalists led by Forbidden Stories, which continues the investigations of the Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered last year.

Moneyval did not accept the invitation of the European Parliament’s special committee on the grounds that Malta was currently undergoing a mutual evaluation by Moneyval and that, therefore, there was no wish to comment publicly on Malta.Sven Giegold
Video

Dooa Eladl
www.w-t-w.org/en/doaa-eladl/

IMF’s Lagarde On The Absence Of Women At Banks

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The lack of women in finance is unfair to women and bad for banks, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde told Yahoo Finance this week at the World Economic Forum.

“There’s something wrong,” said Lagarde, who has helmed the IMF since 2011. “If you look at the composition of boards in that sector, only 20% of them are women. If you look at the CEOs of the financial sector, only 2% are women … our societies don’t look like that. And if you look at graduates from universities and business schools, it doesn’t look like 20% or 2%. It’s a lot more than that.”…The lack of women in finance

WEF: Global Risks Report 2019

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The world faced a growing number of complex and interconnected challenges in 2018. From climate change and slowing global growth to economic inequality, we will struggle if we do not work together in the face of these simultaneous challenges. The Global Risks Report 2019 provides an opportunity to place the global risk landscape into context at the beginning of the new year and identify priority areas for action in 2019.
WEF Global Risks Report 2019
World Economic Forum Annual Meeting/ Videos

World Economic Forum warns of impact of global tensions

Gender, Taxation, and Equality in Developing Countries

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Issues and Policy Recommendations

By Kathleen A. Lahey: Women in 1995 and the establishment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, increasing attention has been focused on how tax laws shape women’s lives, affect their access to property, incomes, and public services, and transmit gendered social expectations and stereotypes within societies, across borders, and through the generations.

Attention to the gender impact of tax laws has been accelerated by key trends in public finance policy frameworks. Beginning in 2005, the OECD and other international organizations began to recommend that countries at all levels of development focus on tax and spending cuts to stimulate economic growth. In the aftermath of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, although many countries responded to the crisis by expanding selected spending measures to offset the recessionary effects of the crisis, the IMF began in 2010 to turn the focus back to fiscal consolidation through tax and spending cuts to promote economic recovery. Since then, the majority of countries at all levels of development began to replace crisis policies with fiscal austerity programs to cut spending on public resources and shift revenue production from progressive tax structures to regressive consumption taxes and privatization of public assets and services.

During this past decade, income inequalities have increased gaps between rich and poor due to lower levels of taxation on high incomes, increased business and individual use of transnational tax reductions and tax havens, over-reliance on shortterm extractive revenues and tax incentives to the corporate sector, and falling levels of public support for key drivers of economic development such as health, education, transportation, and income security spending…Gender, Taxation, and Equality in Developing Countries

Marilena Nardi
www.w-t-w.org/en/cartoon/marilena-nardi/

 

The Risk Of Serious And Organized Crime Infiltration In Europe

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MORE – Modelling and mapping the risk of Serious and Organised Crime infiltration in legitimate businesses across European territories and sectors.

MORE aimed to analyse, model and map the risk factors of serious and organised crime (SOC) infiltration in legitimate European businesses. It focused on risk factors at two levels:
• Macro level, i.e., across countries,regions and business sectors;
• Micro level, i.e., at the firm level, in terms of ownership and accounting red flags.

MORE built on two previous studies also co-funded by the EU Commission:
• The OCP project, which analysed the economy of organised crime in 7 EU MSs (Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK) from a macro perspective;
• The ARIEL project, which analysed the script of OC infiltration in businesses in 5 EU MSs (Italy, the Netherlands,
Slovenia, Sweden and the UK) from a micro perspective.

The MORE project combined the two perspectives and extended the analysis to the whole EU 28. To do so, it adopted a mixed qualitative and quantitative method — which is the only possible way to address a complex issue such as SOC infiltration in
businesses. And in the process, it performed:

• The collection of data, cases and evidence from a wide variety of sources (judicial documents, police reports, institutional reports and media news), relying also on a widespread network of national contact points.
• An in-depth crime-script analysis of 24 case studies of SOC infiltration (equivalent to more than 500 companies
in all EU MS);
• A macro analysis of statistics on selected risk factors across regions, countries and business sectors;
• A micro analysis of ownership and accounting data from a sample of more than 1,000 firms confiscated from OC.

MORE is only a first exploratory step towards a systematic monitoring of the problem of SOC infiltration in businesses across the EU MSs, but it shows that such monitoring would be essential to mitigate and prevent SOC in Europe….MORE_FinalReport
Official website