By Bridget Di Certo
Thursday, 10 May 2012
Phnom Penh Post
Cambodia is ripe for money-laundering and terrorist financing activities
due to rampant corruption, banking-sector secrecy and an overall lack
of financial transparency, a governance institute says in a report
released this week.
The Switzerland-based Basel Institute on Governance
has ranked Cambodia the third “highest-risk” country out of 144 listed
for its failure to comply with anti-money laundering and
counter-terrorism financing standards.
Cambodia’s ranking is
based on standards and other “risk categories such as financial
regulations, public transparency, corruption and rule of law”, according
to the report’s authors.
Cambodia’s risk score is 8.46 out of 10, only slightly lower than Iran, which had the highest score at 8.57.
Cambodia is also the only “high-risk” country in Southeast Asia.
The
report noted that it could only measure risk of money-laundering and
terrorism financing since most of it occurs in “absolute secrecy”.
Transparency International executive director Kol Preap said the lack of transparency in Cambodia’s banking sector was paramount.
“Any significant amount of money could be channelled through this system of secrecy,” Kol Preap said yesterday.
“We
don’t have any anti-money laundering law, but we also need a law for
access to information so we can have the right to request these details
and monitor the track of money,” he said, adding such a statute would
assist in tracking corruption.
“Cambodia has a long way to go on transparency,” he said.
A 2007 US embassy cable published by the anti-secrecy organisation Wikileaks said the Cambodian government was in a “state of denial” about the potential for money-laundering.
Experts
who examined Cambodia’s money-laundering vulnerabilities expressed
“overall frustration with Cambodia’s weak attempts to police its
financial sector”, the cable read.
National Bank of Cambodia officials could not be reached yesterday due to the public holiday.
To contact the reporter on this story: Bridget Di Certo at bridget.dicerto@phnompenhpost.com
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