Apr 07 2009 Martin Coyle
Switzerland's Federal Office of Police has played down the significance of a jump in suspicious activity reports filed last year as well as an almost doubling of the assets involved. The latest figures from the Money Laundering Reporting Office Switzerland, which is responsible for collecting suspicious activity reports, showed that the number of money laundering reports rose by seven per cent in 2008 to 851. This was largely due to the volume of reports from the banking sector, the body said. The value of the assets involved also doubled to an all-time high of 1.87bn Swiss francs. Despite this, a federal police spokeswoman told Complinet that it was a "normal" year.
"Three of the reports had a volume of almost one billion francs which is why we had a doubling of the amount. We can not say that this year was extraordinary in any sense, if you are talking about the amounts it is almost the same image of last year. Most of the reports are related to fraud and in particular investment fraud," she said.
The report indicated that the majority of SARs came from the banking sector, which accounted for 572 of the submitted reports, around 67 per cent of the overall total. The body also pointed to the increasing quality of the reporting by money laundering reporting officers. The office said that it was one its strongest years which was demonstrated by the fact that the proportion of SARs forwarded to prosecution authorities rose slightly to 81 per cent last year. "This demonstrates the quality of the reporting," the spokeswoman said.
The proportion of forwarded SARs varied among the sectors, the federal office said, with the banking sector seeing 87 per cent of reports sent on and the payment services sector only seeing 60 per cent of its SARs forwarded. The report noted that the payment services sector is characterised by the high number of SARs from so-called money transmitters whose nature of business yields limited information on their walk-in customers, which affects the quality of the reports.
The Swiss body received nine SARs related to terrorist financing in 2008, involving assets of more than SFr1m, the majority of which involved one case. The case was forwarded to the prosecuting authority which subsequently dismissed it. All of these SARs bar one were based on information that was received from third parties, such as press reports, and indicated possible terrorist involvement. The Swiss attorney general is looking at four cases that are still pending, the report noted.
