Financial criminals exploit international trade to launder funds through trade transactions to legitimise their illicit origin or finance their activities. As more and more trade operations go online, trade-based money laundering (TBML) is increasingly becoming difficult to detect. Keeping this in mind, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units recently published a joint study to enhance the understanding of TBML and help public and private sectors resolve the problems with TBML detection.
The FATF/Egmont report recommends that to fight TBML, it is important to establish a fruitful collaboration between law enforcement, prosecutors, financial intelligence units, customs services, and other authorities. Moreover, it is important to share information among authorities. This information could include suspicious transaction reports, trade data, beneficial ownership information, criminal records, etc.
One way to foster an effective collaboration is to establish public-private partnership to deal with TBML. Countries should use risk-based analyses to inform the public and private sector entities about international trade-related risks.
Source: FATF