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Banks That Finance Trade Should Screen for Laundering: Banking Consortium
By Brian Monroe
printFinancial institutions providing credit in international transactions should check for suspicious activity pointing to trade-based money laundering, a banking consortium said Thursday. The Wolfsberg Group, an association of 12 of the world's largest banks, called for the enhanced diligence in order to prevent laundering potentially tied to drug cartels, terrorist organizations, sanctions violators and weapons proliferators. Estimates of the dollar amount laundered through trade annually range into the hundreds of billions. To better monitor for the crime, banks that provide letters of credit or bills of collection, which are used in about 20 percent of all trade transactions, should question...
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