By Nike Popoola

The National Insurance Commission has set up an Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Financing of Terrorism compliance unit to eliminate money laundering and terrorism financing in the insurance industry.

The Commissioner for Insurance, Mr. Fola Daniel, disclosed this during the AML/CFT directors’ awareness workshop in Lagos on Thursday.

“The commission has instituted the AML/CFT compliance unit under the inspectorate directorate,” Daniel said.

According to him, a central objective of supervisors and regulators is to use all available tools to ensure that financial institutions are not controlled by criminals or misused for criminal purposes.

For this reason, he said that NAICOM had revised and gazetted the AML/CFT guideline and guidance note for the insurance industry.

The commission, he added, had begun the process of building internal capacity for AML/CFT risk-based supervision, leveraging on the technical support provided by the International Monetary Fund.

Daniel said that every insurance institution had the obligation to know its customers and report suspicious transactions.

“Money laundering is a serious crime that affects the economy as a whole, impeding the social, economic, political and cultural development of societies worldwide,” the Insurance commissioner said.

He observed that in the last decade, globalisation had been accompanied by growth of cross-border and national underground economies, fuelled by illegal businesses.

Fighting money laundering, he said, involved combating the recycling of illegally gained proceeds and providing additional tools to detect and go after the underlying crime.

While explaining the essence of the workshop, Daniel said, “The workshop is, therefore, inevitable and designed to enable the commission carry company directors along in this very important task of achieving industry compliance with the AML/CFT regime.”

Source: Punch