Aug 06 2007 Helen O'Gorman
The latest figures from the Mexican financial intelligence unit show a marked increase in money laundering in the country, the Government has claimed. During the past five months, the Unidad de Inteligencia Financiera, part of the Department of Treasury and Public Credit, has received 31,820 suspicious transaction reports. The reports for the first five months of 2007 make up 52.6 per cent of those reported throughout 2006; in 2004 the FIU received the same amount of reports for the entire year.
Banks, bureaux de change, stock exchanges and other financial intermediaries have a legal obligation to report suspicious operations to the UIF. The unit advises regulated entities to report any transaction that is out of step with the account holder's usual or expected financial profile, which could be foreign transfers, trading foreign currency or a large amount of wire transfers.
Experts and authorities agree that the country's new reporting requirements have influenced the figures. In November 2006 the Hacienda, the treasury, passed a new set of regulations on suspicious activity reporting and gave the Comision Nacional Bancaria de Valores, the financial markets regulator, a more focused supervisory programme to follow, with much greater emphasis on anti-money laundering.
Despite announcing a massive increase in money laundering, the UIF hid carefully behind confidentiality to avoid telling the public how many of the reports it had received eventually led to criminal investigations.
The Mexican anti-money laundering law obliges 2,498 firms from across the financial and intermediary services sectors to report suspicious transactions to the FIU, according to figures published in January. The currency exchange bureaux, which millions of Mexicans use to change Mexican pesos into US dollars and vice versa, led the field with 1,437 reporting entities.
