UAE Central Bank Rescinds Dirham Exchange License for Anti-Money Laundering Violations
The UAE Central Bank officially rescinded the operating license of the UAE-based exchange house, Dirham Exchange. The exchange entity lost its name from the official registration list. The banking sector regulatory bodies are using strong measures to combat financial illegal actions.
The UAE Central Bank also decided to rescind the registration of RMB Commercial Brokers that operated as a Hawala services provider.
The UAE Central Bank issued an announcement on Wednesday stating that it applied administrative sanctions through an appeal process, in accordance with the laws, for the prevention of money laundering, terrorism financing, and the financing of unlawful entities in UAE.
The Central Bank completed extensive examinations which resulted in sanctions against the two companies because of their critical regulatory misconduct. The misconduct included both AML violations together with a scheme to circumvent central bank rules against remittance payments to specific nations.
The examination results demonstrated that the companies had an inadequate compliance framework that caused them to violate regulatory requirements and neglect their reporting duties to CBUAE.
The United Arab Emirates demonstrates significant progress in its fight against money laundering, terrorist financing and weapon proliferation. The United Arab Emirates announced plans to build new federal prosecution offices that will focus specifically on economic criminal cases such as money laundering.The formation of new offices represents the first steps in serious investigations for identifying and halting economic crimes and money laundering, as reported by Wam news. The new offices will manage inquiries and investigations of bankruptcy cases, corporate crimes and financial market offenses, competition regulation matters, intellectual property (IP) issues, trademark infringements and customs evasion offenses.
During the period from 2020 onwards, the UAE government has extradited 899 criminals and found 43 of them guilty of money laundering activities. Among the 43 criminals, ten consisted of terrorists and people providing financial support to terrorist operations.
During the first quarter of this year, the UAE issued financial penalties amounting to over 115 million dirhams (31.3 million US dollars) through its anti-terrorist financing and anti-money laundering campaign.
The UAE’s Executive Unit of AML and CFT together with the World Bank conducted a workshop during last month. The main purpose of this workshop centered on the improvement of financial crime prevention framework. UAE authorities conducted risk assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing throughout the workshop to create powerful mitigation plans.
