Many economic crimes involve misuse of corporate entities to hide origins of illicit gains. Increasing transparency around ultimate beneficial owners of corporate entities and understanding their potential money laundering and terrorist financing risks help countries to mitigate such misuse. Addressing this issue, PGG anti-money laundering project held a two-day training attended by Ukraine’s competent authorities on 15-16 January 2020 in Kyiv. Ukrainian practitioners and policy makers discussed with the Council of Europe experts good practices in assessing and building understanding about potential abuse of legal persons for money laundering and terrorist financing.
This is an area where MONEYVAL, the Council of Europe’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing monitoring body, in its fifth mutual evaluation round recommended the Ukrainian authorities to take measures to strengthen the risk mitigating framework. As an additional important step in this process, PGG project is currently working with a multi-stakeholder working group in Ukraine to provide recommendations for reinforcing reliability of information on beneficial owners of legal entities contained in a dedicated state register. During the first quarter of 2020, PGG project also responded to another priority action identified by MONEYVAL – enhancing the analysis of Ukraine’s money laundering and terrorism financing risks by utilising more statistics and ensuring that the statistics are robust.
To this end, PGG project provided recommendations to further improve a set of comprehensive statistical indicators. These indicators developed by the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine cover a large range of data that should be collected by a number of anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing competent authorities, including supervisory bodies, law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and judicial authorities. Adequate data collection will help the authorities in providing future evidence regarding the effectiveness of Ukraine’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing regime.
