Webinar on Illicit Gold Trade and Using Trade Data and Financial Tools to Fight Money Laundering and Transnational Organisd Crime (July 8, 2020)

Lakshmi Kumar

Join GFI’s Lakshmi Kumar for an exclusive webinar with the Association of Certified Financial Crime Specialists on Wednesday, July 8th, 1:00-2:00 PM EDT.

Complimentary webinar, courtesy of Global Financial Integrity (GFI).

This is part one of a two-part series that will explore issues in gold trafficking as a key money laundering and financing tool for criminal groups and sanctions evasion. The series will look at the illegal gold trade through Colombia, Venezuela, Uganda, the role of commodity trading hubs like Dubai and Switzerland and its impact on the U.S. financial system. What makes gold particularly vulnerable to abuse by organized criminals, armed groups, corrupt oligarchs are the nature and size of the market and anonymity it provides. Gold is a cash intensive business with limited oversight and licensing processes. Furthermore, once gold has been mined, there is nothing in its condition to indicate if it was produced legitimately or otherwise. This makes tracking the origins of gold exceedingly difficult but also highly attractive to illicit actors wishing to hide, move or invest their illicit proceeds. The complex and inter-connected nature of the global financial system and trade system further compounds these problems as does the abuse of anonymous and complex corporate ownership structures to skirt global AML/trade-based money laundering (TBML) efforts. The first part of webinar will look at the use of trade data and other financial tools to examine how the illicit trade in gold can be more effectively understood and tracked. Through a combination of the country and company level export data, the webinar will show investigative techniques to identify TBML risks, as well as other red flag indicators of heightened money laundering risks. Online registration can be had here

www.gfinitegrity.org