While South Korea has established a strong legal framework to fight money laundering, the country must do more to prevent government officials from laundering the proceeds of corruption.
That’s according to a joint report by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the Asia-Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) which had looked into the nation’s anti-money laundering (AML) and counter terrorist financing (CFT) prevention framework.
A lot of the report was positive. For instance, it noted that South Korea has establish a rigorous legal AML and CFT framework and that authorities in the country demonstrate a high level of collaboration.
Although, FATF and APG added that the nation should extend this to include the prosecution of laundering of proceeds of all tax crimes, which has been laid bare over the past few years through a number of high-level corruption cases in South Korea.
To prevent more cases like those, the FATF and APG advised that South Korea should expand its AML and CFT measures to prevent politically exposed persons, both domestic and of international organisations from laundering proceeds of corruption.
The two bodies noted that South Korea is proactively working to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction and has a very high level of awareness of the proliferation financing risks it faces. However, the FATF and APG noted that the country must sill address gaps in its ability to freeze assets under the United Nations sanctions regime.
The FATF and APG added that South Korea is not currently facing any high risk of terrorist financing.
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