Search results

The purpose of the study is to show that divergent perceptions among regulators, the regulated and the associated regulatory bodies across multiple jurisdictions regarding the nature and functionality of cryptocurrencies hamper the development of a more comprehensive and coherent regulatory framework in curbing crimes and other related risks associated with cryptocurrencies.

The study has used a descriptive doctrinal legal research method to investigate and understand the insights of existing laws and regulations in four selected jurisdictions concerning cryptocurrencies and how these laws could be further improved and developed to reduce crypto-related crimes. Furthermore, the study has also used a comparative research method to conceptualize the contours of the new legal discourse emerging from cryptocurrencies to adopt and implement a sound regulatory framework.

The study illustrated that divergent regulatory treatment among different jurisdictions might suffocate novel digital innovations such as cryptocurrency. These fragmented regulatory approaches by various jurisdictions question the sustainability of the present national legislation adopted to regulate cryptocurrencies. Looking into other jurisdictional developments in regulating cryptocurrencies, it is apparent that a concerted regulatory approach is needed to minimize the abuse of this innovation.

The study has implications for regulators and policymakers to review the current regulatory framework for regulating cryptocurrencies to prevent regulatory arbitrage. The divergent legislative measures concerning cryptocurrency among different jurisdictions question the sustainability of these legislative initiatives, considering the evolving and borderless nature of cryptocurrency. Therefore, this paper will help regulators to consider the present legislative gaps in establishing a common global regulatory approach in the crypto sphere.

The study contributes to the existing body of literature by examining the regulatory frameworks of four jurisdictions, namely, the USA, Canada, China and the EU, related to cryptocurrencies, with a discussion on the development of cryptocurrencies-related laws among these four jurisdictions and their sustainability in curbing crimes in the Darknet.

The purpose of this paper is to review studies focusing on the magnitude of money laundering and their effects on a country’s economy. The relevant concepts are identified on the basis of discussions in the literature by prominent scholars and policy makers. There are three main objectives in this review: first, to discuss the effects of money laundering on a country’s macro-economy; second, to seek measurements from other scholars; and finally, to seek previous findings about the magnitude and the flows of money laundering.

In the first part, this paper outlines the effects of money laundering on macroeconomic conditions of a country, and then the second part reviews the literature that measures the magnitude of money laundering from an economic perspective.

Money laundering affects a country’s economy by increasing shadow economy and criminal activities, illicit flows and impeding tax collection. To minimise these negative effects, it is necessary to quantify the magnitude of money laundering relative to economic conditions to identify the most vulnerable aspects of money laundering in a country. Two approaches are used in this study: the first is the capital flight approach, as money laundering will cause flows of money between countries; the second is the economic approach for measuring money laundering through economic variables (e.g. tax revenue, underground economy and income generated by criminals) separately from tax evasion.

The paper offers new insights for the measurement of money laundering, especially for developing countries. Most methods in quantifying money laundering have focused on developed countries, which are less applicable to developing countries.

This paper aims to determine the preferable destinations of money laundered from Pakistan by using the Walker’s Gravity Model and to estimate the amount of money laundered through 156 countries. The research aims to facilitate policymakers and regulators to provide more efficient guidelines to counter the problem of money laundering.

This study uses a descriptive and quantitative approach. This study uses the Walker’s Gravity Model updated by Unger et al. (2006) to measure money laundering in Pakistan; Walker’s Gravity Model was first developed by John Walker in 1994.

The results indicate that Pakistani money launderers preferred countries having large financial sectors and political stability to hide their illegal money. In addition, the study estimates the amount of money laundered and shows that Pakistan has lost bulk of funds.

The major limitation is the non-availability of reliable data as the activity is hidden. Reliable data is either not available officially or scattered. Available data only reflect aspects that are reported. Non-availability of statistics for all years and countries resulted in the omission of some countries.

The study helps legislators and policymakers, including the Ministry of Finance, State Bank of Pakistan, Securities and Exchange Commission Pakistan, and other regulators, including law enforcement agencies and financial institutions, in formulating effective policies, regulations and internal control.

The study helps to identify the need of estimating the amount of money laundered to fight the problem effectively. Very few efforts have made to determine the size and the amount of money laundered, and this is the first study to determine the amount of money flowing out of Pakistan with the purpose of laundering.

The purpose of this paper is to document a Danish fraud scheme, in which a large number of limited companies were stripped of their assets leaving them with nothing but tax debt, eventually causing the Danish Tax and Customs Administration to lose large sums. Furthermore, the purpose is to analyse why the asset‐stripping schemes occurred in a mature market economy with a strong corporate governance system and a low level of corruption.

The research is conducted as a longitudinal single case study based on documentary research.

The Danish case indicates that asset stripping may take place in mature market economies to the extent that perpetrators are able to circumvent the corporate governance system by giving lawyers, public accountants and banks incentives to act less critically towards dubious business transactions.

The opportunity and rationalisations supporting the fraud are particular to the Danish context.

The paper provides insights into the consequences of professionals disregarding their duty to serve the public interest.

The paper provides an example on how to circumvent the social supervisory system of a mature market economy.

The paper contributes to the knowledge about asset stripping by documenting and analysing the phenomenon in a mature market economy context.

Money laundering and terrorism financing use the banking sector system illegally and result in enormous losses for the state and nation. Regulatory Technology (RegTech) is an important part of effectively preventing money laundering and terrorism financing. However, the implementation of RegTech related to the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing, especially in the Indonesian banking sector, has not been widely studied and discussed. Therefore, this study aims to provide empirical testing evidence regarding the effectiveness of RegTech implementation in the Indonesian banking sector to prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

This study uses primary data obtained through a survey distributed to 160 bankers who work in eight different banks in Indonesia with a 95% confidence level and a confidence interval of 7.75. The criteria needed to determine the sample in this study are individuals who actively work as staff whose work is directly related to banking; individuals who are actively working in banks registered with OJK; individuals who have been actively working in the banking sector in Indonesia for at least three years. The data that has been obtained were analyzed using the SmartPLS application to test the validity and reliability, descriptive statistics and structural models (inner model).

The results of this study indicate that electronic know your customer (eKYC), transaction monitoring (TM), cost and time efficiencies (CTE) influence the prevention of anti-money laundering (AML) and countering financing of terrorism (CFT) in the Indonesian banking sector. However, eKYC and CTE have little influence on AML-CFT in the Indonesian banking sector. Meanwhile, TM has a moderate influence on AML-CFT in the Indonesian banking sector. In addition, in general, most bankers agree that the bank they work for has followed the guidelines, policies and regulations that have been given.

This study uses the Indonesian banking sector as a research subject that raises the effectiveness of the implementation of the use of RegTech to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the regulatory mechanisms adopted by two African countries, Nigeria and Zambia, in dealing with money laundering in their countries and to suggest ways of enhancing the effectiveness of these mechanisms to serve as veritable models for other African states.

The relevant laws enacted by these states in their efforts to tackle this crime were examined to assess their adequacy or otherwise in this direction. The key provisions of these enactments, namely, the Nigerian Money Laundering Prohibition Act, 2004 and the Zambian Prohibition and Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2001, were discussed and the similarities and dissimilarities in both enactments highlighted.

It was found that these enactments have provided the requisite regulatory framework for dealing with this crime in these countries. In particular, both enactments contain novel provisions such as prohibition on cash transactions involving large sums of money, forfeiture of assets obtained from money‐laundering transactions, etc. It was also found that, although enacted three years earlier, in 2001, the Zambian enactment is more comprehensive and forward‐looking than the Nigerian Act, which was enacted in 2004, as the former provides for the establishment of an investigation unit within the Anti‐Money Laundering Authority, provisions that are absent in the Nigerian enactment.

The implication of this finding is that African states must adopt strict and stringent measures to enhance the enforcement of Money Laundering Laws, with the regulatory mechanisms, which were put in place by these countries in tackling the menace, serving as veritable guideposts.

The paper demonstrates, in a special way, the steps taken by two African states, Nigeria and Zambia, in dealing with money laundering and suggests that, if other states utilize these measures, it will go a long way in improving their capability in the fight against money laundering. It finally suggests proper co‐operation and collaboration between African states to make the fight more meaningful.

The Internet, since its commercialisation, has expanded with tremendous rapidity. This development has been still further assisted by the creation of the World Wide Web, which has caught the imagination of users around the world. As the marketing and provision of goods and services over the Web continues to grow, the missing factor appears to be a well‐accepted and well‐trusted method of paying for these products and services. This paper discusses the problem of internet payment systems (IPS) and reports the results of a research project which attempts to identify and classify effectiveness criteria for IPS. The project was undertaken by means of a Delphi survey of experts in IPS usage and classified types of IPS providers, as well as the factors which each group considers most important. This information was used in the development of our set of IPS effectiveness criteria.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF’s) recommendations in Latin America in the fight against Money Laundering (ML) through the Immediate Outcomes 4 (Preventive Measures) and 6 (Financial Intelligence) and the relationship between anti-money laundering (AML) effectiveness and anti-corruption measures.

Through quantitative and quality methods measure the performance of the Immediate Outcomes’ levels in compliance with the established FATF’ standards; The objective is to analyze progress in the prevention and identification of ML.

The authors discuss the relationship between AML effectiveness and anti-corruption measures starting with the analysis of the best-ranked country in these indicators (IO4 and IO6).

Mutual evaluations require a long process, which is why the authors do not have all the updated data for all the Latin American countries; only the updated Immediate Outcomes data up to September 16, 2021, are taken. This paper is part of the Research Project “The impacts of corruption in the Western Hemisphere and regional responses.”

Through a multidisciplinary analysis, the Immediate Results evaluation model is prioritized to measure the effectiveness of the methods applied in Latin America through the IO4 and IO6. The model that presents the best effectiveness is selected and the successes that this country is applying over its peers are analyzed. From this analysis, a quantitative and qualitative analysis can be appreciated.

The objective of this paper is to illustrate the link between the effectiveness of the anti‐money laundering regulations and the characteristics of the compliance costs involved for banks. The work is set out as follows. The next section describes the economic framework, which starts with the assumption that intermediaries have an advantage in terms of information and then demonstrates, by means of a principal‐agent model, how this advantage can produce collective gains in the war against money laundering only if the regulations take the problem of compliance costs into due consideration.

Cryptoassets have recently attracted the attention of national and international financial regulators. Since the mid-2010s blockchains have increasingly been adapted to automate and replace many aspects of financial intermediation, and by 2015 Ethereum had created the smart contract language that underpins the digitization of real assets as asset-backed tokens (ABTs). Those were initially issued by FinTech companies, but more recently banks active on international capital and financial markets, and even central banks, for example, the Bank of Thailand, have developed their own digital platforms and blockchains. A wide variety of real and financial assets underpins ABTs, viz., real-estate, art, corporate and sovereign bonds, and equity. Consequently, owing to the significant market capitalization of cryptocurrencies, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) published two consultative papers delineating its approach on cryptoasset regulation. In this study, the authors analyze the mechanics of ABTs and their potential risks, relying on case studies of recent issuance of tokens in equity, real-estate, and debt markets, to highlight their main characteristics. The authors also investigate the consequences of the increasingly oligopolistic structure of blockchain mining pools and Bitcoin exchanges for the integrity and security of unregulated distributed ledgers. Finally, the authors analyze the BCBS’ regulatory proposals, and discuss the reaction of international financial institutions and cryptocurrency interest groups. The main findings are, firstly, that most ABTs are akin to asset-backed securities. Secondly, nearly all ABTs are “off-chain/on-chain,” that is, the underlying is a traditional asset that exists off-chain and is subsequently digitized. The main exception is the World Bank’s bond-i that is genuinely native to the blockchain created by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and has no existence outside it. Thirdly, all ABTs are issued on permissioned blockchains, where anti-money laundering/anti-terrorist funding and know-your-customer regulations are enforced. From a prudential regulatory perspective, ABTs do not appear to pose serious systemic risks to international financial markets. This may account for the often negative reactions of banks, banking associations, and cryptocurrency interest groups to the BCBS’ 2021 proposals for risk-weighted capital provisions for cryptoassets, which are viewed as excessive. Finally, we found that issuance of ABTS and other smart contracts on permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum could potentially generate financial instability. A precedent involving Ethereum and The DAO in 2016 shows that (i) there is a significant accountability gap in permissionless blockchains, and (ii) the core developers of blockchains and smart contract technology, and Bitcoin mining pools, exercise an unexpectedly high- and completely unregulated-amount of power in what is supposedly a decentralized network.