New law to combat money laundering and funding terrorism to be issued

Money laundering and embezzlement, sometimes as part of drug trade, is still a problem in Yemen, but it is limited in scope, said Mustafa Saif, the head of the Committee for Combating money Laundering and funding terrorism. “We have heard about crimes of seized many quantities of drugs, so unfortunately there are crimes of money laundering in Yemen,” he said. “We have law of money laundering that issued in 2003, but we are in need for more combating of money laundering and funding terrorism.”

To aid the fight, the Committee for Combating Money Laundering and Combating the Funding of Terrorism has finalized a new draft law in cooperation with World Bank and United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the head of the committee Mustafa Saif said on Saturday. The new draft law limits the amount of money that can be transferred from one bank account to another, and from inside the country to outside the country, and vice versa. The law also calls for better monitoring of money transfers through corporations or other authorities. Previous laws did not include these measures. “The draft is under final revision and, the committee achieved the first phase of evaluation of Yemen’s efforts to combat money laundering and funding terror,” said Saif.

The new law is now ready to be sent to Parliament, said Saif. It has already been examined by the international committee dedicated to fighting money laundering. As part of the evaluation process, the Working Group of the Middle East and North Africa to Yemen, sent a questionnaire about money laundering efforts in Yemen to the Central Bank of Yemen, in order to find out how it was doing at battling these problems.

The Working Group of the Middle East and North Africa is expected visit Yemen next month and pay field visits to all supervisory official and private bodies on combating money laundering and funding terror, to study the strengths and weakness in systems of those bodies and ask national authorities to prepare draft report of the joint evaluation.” The draft report would be discussed next April, 2008 in the meeting of the group that would be attended by all members of the group to evaluate system of combating these acts and its effect in each country, he said.

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