Director-General of the Inter-Governmental Action Group Against Money Laundering in West Africa (GIABA), Mr. Edwin W. Harris Jnr Director/Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit, Mr. Modibbo Hamman Tukur, President of the Compliance Officers Forum of GIABA Member State, Mr. Pattison Boleigha.
Delegates and Representatives from regulatory, supervisory and other authorities of GIABA member states
Members of the Press
I am delighted to welcome you all to this summit. It is particularly pleasing to welcome the representatives of supervisory institutions and reporting entities from across our region. Indeed, your presence here underscores the importance which you accord to this Summit and the mission of GIABA.
As you are aware, the 40th Technical Commission and Plenary as well as the 27th Ministerial Committee meetings of GIABA came to a conclusion this past weekend.
It is gratifying to note that GIABA has convened this summit immediately following our policy discussions over the last week, as it gives us an opportunity to engage with the institutions directly responsible for protecting our national and regional financial systems from the threat of money laundering, terrorist financing and serious crimes.
The theme of this summit highlights the nexus between money laundering, terrorism and proliferation financing with emerging advancements in technology.
As I noted in my opening speech at the Plenary on 16th November, the increasing spread and dynamism in technology coupled with geo-political fragility is creating fertile ground for organised criminal groups and transnational terrorist organisations to conduct their illegal activities on a global scale.
In particular the explosion in decentralised finance has created opportunities for the kind of anonymous financial systems that facilitates illicit financial flows and hampers the ability of our law enforcement and regulatory agencies to trace and identify proceeds of criminal activity.
A few weeks ago, the Financial Action Task Force, INTERPOL and the Egmont Group of FIUs released a paper on the Illicit Financial Flows from Cyber-Enabled Fraud.
The paper noted the increasing scope of global fraud, the complex criminal structures involved in the wide-range of typologies involved and the inter-connected nature of cyber-fraud with other serious organised criminal activity.
In particular, the paper emphasised the role of digitalised finance, particularly across Africa. This elevated risk of money laundering linked to cyber-crime is reflected in Nigeria’s National Risk Assessment published earlier this year which noted fraud as one of the four highest-risk predicate offences we must combat as a country.
Of more damaging consequence is the threat identified by the Financial Action Task Force of the abuse of crowd-funding to facilitate terrorism.
In October this year, the FATF released a paper on Crowdfunding for Terrorism Financing, which noted that while the vast majority of crowdfunding is used to support legitimate activities, there are elevated risks of abuse by terrorists particularly where virtual assets are used, through social media platforms. Underlying all these are dedicated technology platforms which provide for the seamless movement of funds, rapidly and sometimes anonymously across national borders.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is very clear that the threats we are facing will only continue to grow and evolve in unanticipated ways. In particular, the threat of artificial intelligence and generative technologies are already beginning to manifest new avenues for fraud.
At the policy level, we must make all efforts to ensure that we understand the range of threats that we face and those that will confront us in the future.
This emphasises the need for continuous and ongoing ways on risk assessment and typologies work, and in this area, I am pleased that GIABA has continued to work with authorities and institutions across our countries to produce regional typology studies, a number of which were discussed last week.
As authorities of our countries, we should use these as the foundation to deepen our own domestic assessments, and I am pleased to report that in Nigeria this is at the heart of our National AML/CFT/CPF Strategy which was approved earlier this year.
In particular that Strategy emphasised the role of deep and thorough understanding of the risk landscape as the foundation of an effective AML/CFT system.
We also recognise that the effective delivery of this strategy will also require that we have effective national coordination measures in place and will also prioritise effective international cooperation and partnership.
I am pleased to report, Ladies and Gentlemen, that we have already made progress across a number of areas since the approval of the strategy. Our regulatory authorities continue to strengthen their monitoring and supervisory systems and in particular enhancing measures related to high-risk activities, products, services and customers.
These include enhanced measures related to Politically Exposed Persons and targeted financial sanctions as well as improved measures on beneficial ownership information. The measures that we have taken clearly signifies this administration’s intent to combat serious crimes in Nigeria.
In similar vein, we have also continued to make progress in implementing the Action Plan we jointly agreed with the International Cooperation Review Group of the FATF in February 2023.
During his visit last week, the Vice-President of the FATF noted the progress made by Nigeria during discussions in the Plenary meeting.
We are committed to ensuring that Nigeria exits from the grey-list by the deadline of June 2025 and we extend our gratitude to the DG of GIABA for the support provided by his team in this regard. I call on all our competent authorities and regulated entities to enhance their commitment to this goal.
The challenges posed by inclusion in the ICRG process is one that confronts most of the countries in our region. This points to the underlying need for more efforts to prioritise the effectiveness of our national AML/CFT frameworks.
This is even more important as the global network and indeed GIABA are ramping up preparations for the next round of mutual evaluations. I believe this new cycle will be more risk-based and outcome-focused.
It is clear that we must begin preparations as early as possible in order to avoid perceptions of West Africa as a weak link in global financial integrity.
Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to conclude by calling for a renewed commitment to protecting our financial systems, promoting preventive measures through responsible technologies, and recognition of our roles in the safety of our region. We must move from compliance as a minimum standard to embedding a culture of compliance across all our institutions and organisations.
On this note, I am pleased to declare this West African Compliance Summit open and to wish all the Chief Compliance Officers, high-level officers and other participants fruitful deliberations over the next few days.
Fagbemi SAN, the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice, delivered this piece at the GIABA West Africa Compliance Summit between November 20 and 23, 2023 in Abuja.
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