UAE continues its fight against money laundering and terrorist financing

The United Arab Emirates continues to fight a major scourge of international mafia activity that launders money and finances terrorism. To combat these threats, the UAE is taking important steps and imposing new laws to eradicate these practices.

The UAE is positioning itself as a strategic enclave for world powers in the Middle East, but to maintain this trend and establish itself definitively as one of the world's most important global trade hubs, it must stamp out money laundering and terrorist financing.

Through international cooperation, the UAE is working and developing new ways to thwart attempts by international organised crime to operate in the UAE, thereby strengthening the integrity of the international financial system.

In fact, the UAE Central Bank has issued new rules to combat money laundering through the country's financial institutions, which will have one month to implement these new regulations.

Fundamentally, the imposition of these rules will require the precise identification of clients, as well as the establishment of a control and follow-up of these clients, which will allow, among other things, the monitoring of their transactions in order to avoid fraudulent movements.

By monitoring the transactions of identified customers, it will be possible to detect unusual and highly suspicious patterns of activity, which may constitute a crime.

In such situations, entities are obliged to notify the Financial Intelligence Unit in order to be able to proceed with the relevant investigations.

The United Arab Emirates is fighting this type of crime head-on, which is why the value of operations and procedures to eradicate money laundering and terrorist financing amounted to more than USD 1 billion last year.

This included $625 million in assets seized, as well as $64 million in fines levied on those who laundered money or financed terrorism through entities in the UAE.