Senate seen to approve AMLA amendments by June

MANILA, Philippines -  The Senate may approve this week amendments to the Anti-Money Laundering Act (AMLA) to beat the June deadline imposed by the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) to strengthen the law.

Sen. Francis Escudero, chairman of the Senate committee on banks, financial institutions and currencies, asked his colleagues to pass Senate Bill 1468, which he described as a simple amendment to the AMLA.

The bill, approved on second reading, seeks to put more teeth into the existing AMLA by including the casino industry under coverage of the law.

In its plenary meeting last September, APG decided to give the Philippines until June 2017 to pass the required legislation.

The inclusion of casinos in the AMLA coverage is one of the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism watchdog, to avoid the potential blacklisting of the Philippines.

“Failure to enact the required legislation within the given timeframe would put the Philippines under monitoring of the International Review Group of the FATF, which could eventually result in the possible blacklisting of the Philippines,” Escudero said.

Moreover, the senator said the blacklist tag would put the country under stringent international financial scrutiny, which might increase the cost of bank transactions abroad.

“Unfortunately, this would highly affect the remittances from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs),” Escudero said.

Last year, the country barely escaped being on the FATF blacklist after hackers stole $81 million from the account of Bangladesh Bank in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and was then diverted to four fake bank accounts in the Philippines.

“The heist therefore highlighted a vulnerable aspect in our anti-money laundering efforts and underlined the FATF’s conditions with regard to casinos,” he said.

In 2012, the Philippines made progress after it was upgraded from FATF’s dark gray list to its gray list.

However, in 2013, even after the enactment of Republic Act No. 10365 – which further strengthened the anti-money laundering drive and removed the Philippines from the FATF’s list of vulnerable jurisdictions – casinos were still not put under scrutiny of the law.

Under the measure, Escudero said casinos, with respect to cash transactions related to their gaming operations, shall be considered as “covered persons.”

A single casino cash transaction involving an amount in excess of P5 million or its equivalent in any other currency will be considered as a “covered transaction.”

The APG is an autonomous and collaborative international organization founded in 1997 in Bangkok, Thailand consisting of 41 members and a number of international and regional observers.

Some of the key international organizations who help support the efforts of the APG in the region include the Financial Action Task Force, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, OECD, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Asian Development Bank and the Egmont Group of Financial Intelligence Units.