China Aims To Fight Money Laundering With Int’l Cooperation

In an effort to clamp down on cross-border money laundering, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) plans to bolster cooperation with other nations such as countries in Europe. The central bank’s efforts would home in on areas such as financial information exchange, anti-money laundering (AML) regulation and asset recovery, Reuters reported.

According to a report of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a “large amount of illicit proceeds flows out of China annually.” However, the PBOC said, “The Chinese government has spared no effort to crack down on all kinds of criminal activities, including money laundering.” From 2014 to 2016, it recovered illegal funds of $1.25 billion or 8.6 billion yuan from more than 90 countries. At the same time, it noted, “Of course, there is room for improvement in this area, and we are working to strengthen these aspects.”

The 38-member FATF is a worldwide setter of standards when it comes to combating money laundering. And China is poised to take over the FATF presidency at the beginning of July.

In other past AML news, the People’s Bank of China announced new anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulations for online financial institutions (FIs) per news last October. The new standards, which were to come into effect on Jan. 1, make institutions create internal control mechanisms for preventing terrorism financing as well as money laundering, following know your customer (KYC) rules, and quickly reporting suspicious and large transactions.

At the time, the country’s central bank added that it would bolster its own supervision process for addressing money laundering as well as terrorism financing. China isn’t the only region dealing with these issues, as news surfaced earlier last year that Iceland’s efforts over the last decade to focus on crimes that were associated with the financial crisis around the globe has hurt its law enforcement of money laundering and terrorism financing.