Our latest edition of Chatterbox is now available to read online. All of us involved in the international fight against financial crime are inundated with an enormous volume of news about regulatory changes and emerging threats. The team at Great Chatwell makes it our mission to scour the news…

The recommended frequency of AML training organised by an MLRO (Money Laundering Report Officer) is dependent upon several factors that we will cover below – but it is recommended by the Academy that training takes part at least annually. The objective of AML Training The objective of AML tra…

Tax evasion, tax avoidance, tax efficiency, tax arbitrage, tax rationalisation, tax management – these are all terms used to describe the various methods of reducing the tax bill of a legal or natural person. But how do you distinguish between them?  What is allowed and what is not allowed?  W…

Much has been written about money laundering and what it actually is – in terms of the concept itself and the offences of money laundering. It seems simple – it has been drilled into employees, in financial services particularly, that money laundering is placement, layering and integration, a …

Trade, the global economy of import/export, has been described as a ‘readymade vehicle for laundering’. So what is it and how does trade based laundering work? Trade based laundering aims to move value through the use of the financial sector.  It requires collusion by the parties to the tra…

Often spoken about as partners in crime (pun intended), bribery and corruption are not the same.   Corruption is the umbrella term for various activities conducted by those in positions of power, quite often those with political power, by abuse of those powers entrusted to them.  Bribery is, p…

What is terrorist financing? Terrorist financing, as a concept, is concerned with the provision of funding or resources to proscribed terrorist organisations.  The devil, however, is in the detail, e.g.: There is no internationally agreed upon definition of terrorism with different jurisd…

“Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. What is needed…

The British are obsessed with the weather, it dominates our conversation, our lives and recently the news headlines. Apocalyptic weather has been reported in Central America, the Caribbean Islands and across the state of Florida, whilst in Asia devastating rains and flooding have killed and displ…

The elephant in the room! I have observed with increasing unease and frustration for some time now how despite the very honest and diligent efforts of the band of brothers and sisters in the financial crime compliance profession around the world we appear to be losing the war on illicit financ…

At the moment, people in perceived positions of power and hence potentially vulnerable to corruption must be flagged as a PEP including their spouses, close associates and family members.  Okay, I get that.  Because you can have a public figure who abuses their power and co-opts friends and famil…

The unchartered and unregulated seas of virtual currencies have until now provided rich pickings for those peddling illicit goods, sanctions and tax evaders and money launderers. With the notable exception of the rulings provided by FinCEN and the ‘Bit Licensing’ of the NY DFS and a few other sta…