Minister of Finance Dr.Ibrahim Bin Abdul Aziz Al-Assaf has opened a symposium on "Money Laundering's Status and Challenges," hosted by the Institute of Public Administration (IPA) in Riyadh. At the outset, Al-Assaf thanked IPA for the good choice of Symposium's topic and said it would discuss vital issues affecting the interests and security of the country and the rest of the world. He said that the money laundering operation is an economic crime, adding that crimes associated with it in terms of its emergence and methodology as well as its contribution in financing acts of terrorism, are sources of concern to security, financial and economic authorities. The Minister of Finance pointed out to the growing interest in money-laundering offenses in recent years with the expansion of the volume of this type of operational activities involving huge amount of money reaching figures of up to hundreds of billions of dollars, with some estimates indicating that overall amounts of money laundered globally ranges between 2 and 5 percent of World GDP. "Moreover, it also involves very complicated methods that facilitate penetration into the banking systems." He said "Perhaps the starting point is to define the real meaning of money-laundering operations, which in my opinion to the spectrum of their closest understanding could be conducting financial transactions that are aimed at concealing the source or destination of money and money laundering, meaning that the procedure through which the transfer of money takes place via its illicit origin and making them appear as legitimate money. "As a result, several measures have been adopted to combat international money-laundering offenses, which culminated into a number of conventions and laws at the United Nations and regional and international organizations, several legislative, executive and judicial bodies in various countries of the world are collaborating at the local and international levels to combat these crimes." --MORE
