Money Markets
By GEOFFREY IRUNGU, girungu@ke.nationmedia.com
In Summary
- Kenya’s financial sector status on the watchlist is being reviewed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) — an international standards body on AML/CFT — which visited Kenya earlier this month.
- The standard’s body has maintained Kenya on the “watchlist” for years on the basis that it does not have sufficient anti-terror and anti-money laundering controls.
A State financial markets monitor is
investigating 148 cases of suspicious transactions as it seeks the
removal of Kenya from a list of countries without enough anti-money
laundering (AML) and criminalising financing terrorism (CFT) safeguards.
Kenya’s Financial Reporting Centre (FRC) said
another 53 cases that have been investigated have been forwarded to law
enforcement agencies, including the Criminal Investigations Department
(CID) and the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission (EACC), for possible
prosecution.
Kenya’s financial sector status on the watchlist
is being reviewed by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) — an
international standards body on AML/CFT — which visited Kenya earlier
this month.
The standard’s body has maintained Kenya on the
“watchlist” for years on the basis that it does not have sufficient
anti-terror and anti-money laundering controls, and is therefore exposed
to financial crimes.
“We have been investigating many cases since FRC
came into operation and we have had 207 suspicious transactions. Of
these, 59 are fully analysed and 53 have been forwarded to law
enforcement agencies.
“Six cases have been closed because they required
no further action,” said James Manyonge, company secretary and head of
legal and policy at FRC. But Mr Manyonge did not reveal the amounts
involved in the suspicious transactions.
Asked about the slow pace at which the
investigations had progressed, Mr Manyonge said the FRC was still at a
growth stage and had only 17 employees.
“I wouldn’t say that we have been slow. The numbers have been growing and this is still a new organisation,” said Mr Manyonge.
Among the factors identified as contributing to
Kenya’s “watchlist” status was the fact that it had not implemented the
AML/CFT regulations, which were supposed to accompany the anti-money
laundering Act.
The regulations were put into operation last
year. Kenya’s weak position in meeting clean money standards first came
to the limelight in June 2012 during a FATF meeting.
In the same year in October, Kenya sent a
delegation comprising officials from the Central Bank of Kenya, the
Treasury, the FRC and the National Intelligence Services to Paris where
it made a presentation to FATF officials showing the laws that the
country had enacted.
“Most of the transactions were conducted in cash,
with 90 per cent of the cases being from commercial banks. The rest of
the cases were from telecom and other companies,” said Mr Manyonge.
In February this year, FATF said it was monitoring
countries that had committed to meeting the international standards,
including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Kuwait, Cuba and
oil-rich Angola.
FATF noted that Kenya had made significant steps
to address the problems in its financial system, but it would review the
situation on the ground to confirm that progress had indeed taken
place.
No comments:
Post a Comment