"No one should be able to benefit from the fruits of crime. A world without money laundering would be a world with much less crimes. If money laundering left without controls, the dirty money will gradually break through the 'legal' economy and finally will threaten the integrity of the whole society," said first vice-president of ABC Bank, Egypt, Hany Abou-El-Fotouh.

Abou-El-Fotouh was chairing the third Annual Middle East Anti-Money Laundering Forum in Bahrain.

The forum has presented comprehensive outlook towards updating anti-money laundering (AML) framework. He said that money laundering is a global concern that requires intensive international action. The huge amounts of dirty money injected into the international financial markets may also undermine the financial system.

"The governments in the Middle East continue to improve their efforts to develop effective anti-money laundering system. Countries in the region have taken advanced measures in the fight against money laundering," he said.

"Among the robust measures, governments have enacted anti-money laundering legislation that criminalises money laundering for a wide range of crimes and created financial intelligence units or similar functions.

“They issued anti-money laundering guidelines for financial institutions and non-financial institutions as well as regulations to register hawala dealers and to control the work of charities and non-profit organisations. Moreover, rules on cross-border movement of cash and precious metals have been introduced.  The most significant initiative was the establishment of Middle East & North Africa Financial Action Task Force (MENA FATF) having members from 17 countries and 12 organisations as observers," he added.

He concluded by saying that despite the global effort and progress achieved to deter money laundering, there is a considerable amount of work still to be done in this area. – TradeArabia News Service