Expanded laundering coverage sought

Manila, Philippines - The Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) is calling on lawmakers to expand the coverage of the anti-money laundering law to include corruption, plunder and other offenses.

At the resumption of the joint hearing of the Senate Blue Ribbon committee and joint oversight committee on money laundering yesterday, Vicente Aquino, executive director of the AMLC, said there should be an expanded list of predicate crimes or unlawful activities which can be linked to money laundering to speed up the resolution of cases brought before them.

“I could not close my eyes (to) what happened to the corruption and plunder cases that the Blue Ribbon committee in the Senate have been investigating,” Aquino said, referring to allegations of large-scale corruption in the military.

The Senate hearing stemmed from the exposés in earlier Senate hearings that former military comptrollers Carlos Garcia and Jacinto Ligot were able to withdraw millions from their bank accounts before a freeze order was implemented.

Aquino noted that the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering listed about 20 unlawful activities that can generate dirty money. Among these crimes are bribery, trafficking in human beings and human smuggling, sexual exploitation of women and children, corruption of public officials, counterfeiting and environmental crimes.

He said Singapore alone has more than 300 predicate crimes under its anti-money laundering act.

But Sen. Joker Arroyo cautioned his colleagues against adding every crime to the predicate list, saying AMLA was approved primarily to stop activities that finance terrorism and drug-trafficking activities.

“We cannot put every provision on the penal code as a predicate crime… we have to look at the origin and look at it,” Arroyo said.

In the same hearing, Justice Secretary Leila de Lima said the direction of the proposed amendments to the AMLA should be carefully studied.

“Perhaps there are some (additional predicate crimes) in the list already in the present AMLA and there could be some in the list which can be deleted,” De Lima said.