Islands urged to draw up deterrent legislations

Dionisia Tabureguci
Pacific Islands countries (PICS) have been urged to keep up with the evolving international criminal world and to constantly tweak their anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing legislations to reflect these changes.

And with that in mind, PICs may also consider that effective legislations are those that critically hamper criminal activities.

“Money launderers have very creative, inventive criminal minds and they are going to come up with new ideas, new techniques to launder money, to finance terrorism, so whatever we have in place right now may not be enough to deal with that problem next year or in years to come.

“So our anti-money laundering system and counter terrorist financing regimes have to evolve, they have to change,” Kosi Latu told ISLANDS BUSINESS magazine last month.

Latu is the coordinator of the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat-based Pacific Anti-Money Laundering Programme (PALP) which was set up last September to assist countries in the region establish or enhance  their anti-money laundering (AML) and counter terrorism financing (CTF) regimes.

A number of Pacific countries have been associated in the past with money laundering ventures and financial scams.

Their vulnerabilities had much to do with lax regulations and legislations to deal with money laundering. But over time, pressures put upon them by international money laundering watchdogs such as the France-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development have helped them identify and improve their legal systems.

The global concern over money laundering has also been extended to include terrorist financing, with international authorities now strongly associating dirty money with the financing of terrorist activities.

While Pacific islands countries have generally managed to improve their anti-money laundering legislations and thus easing off international pressures, they need to keep the momentum going.

“The first thing that countries need to do in terms of legislations is to make sure the legislations provide them with the ability to criminalise money laundering and terrorist financing and also with the ability to prosecute successfully,” Latu said.

“It’s very important the legislation doesn’t just criminalise money laundering but that it is able to have a much wider, broader coverage. At the moment, the international standard is that all serious crimes must be predicate offences for money laundering. And some countries need to step up to that mark.”

Latu said that money laundering was already criminalised in many Pacific islands countries. But he stressed the enforcement of these laws is key to a country achieving progress in the global fight against major crimes. And this is where capacity and skills of stakeholders in a country’s judicial and legal systems become important.

“It is one thing to criminalise money laundering but if you don’t have the ability to seize, confiscate and forfeit, then you may end up convicting the criminals while their assets remain in a safe place. So it is not just about getting the criminals behind bars, it’s also about efforts to get to their assets.

“Most criminals are prepared to go to jail as long as they know their millions are stacked away safely. So the whole approach to money laundering has to be different. You have to ensure the criminals don’t prefer to go to jail.

“There must be disincentives so that when criminals get involved in criminal activities, they know they will go to jail and also lose everything. They would know that whatever it is they had obtained illegally, the law is strong enough to take them away from them.”

An integral part of PALP’s work therefore is capacity building in countries it is helping.

Latu described PALP’s programme delivery as being two-pronged: through in-country on-site mentoring and its regional training initiatives.

“Our training initiatives are very different in the sense that they are very practical in approach and based on real life scenarios. We take real life cases that have actually happened in the region and we use them as examples where law enforcement officers and prosecutors are trained to apply their skills.”

For its on-site mentoring, PALP has its staff stationed in Tonga and Vanuatu, while Latu is based in Fiji.

“Our legal mentor is based in Tonga and our law enforcement mentor is in Vanuatu and when they go to a country, they actually spend time there to show people how things ought to be done and what needs to be done.

“Then they do follow-up to see things are being done properly so the concept of mentoring, when applied in a very practical way, has enormous benefits for those on the ground. And it is being done in a bilateral way,” Latu explained.

Using the two complementary approaches, PALP hopes to bring Pacific islands countries up to speed with developments in the global fight against anti-money laundering and counter terrorist financing.

PALP is a joint initiative between the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), and the US State Department. The four-year programme is being funded by the US State Department.