‘MORE DISCLOSURES SINCE JANUARY’
Bank Negara received over 5 million records of transactions worth RM483b
BANK Negara Malaysia has received more than five million reports of cash transactions worth RM483 billion in the nine months after the daily cash threshold report (CTR) was lowered to RM25,000 from RM50,000.
Governor Datuk Nor Shamsiah Mohd Yunus said while it was too early to draw any concrete conclusions, the total value of cash transactions reported had increased marginally while the number of CTR received had nearly doubled.
Still, the significant increase in CTRs since January provided Bank Negara important data that enabled more rigorous monitoring of peculiarities in cash transactions and identification of money laundering and terrorist financing risks on newly-identified entities that had not been captured previously, she said.
“These additional insights also lead to better disclosures, especially in relation to fraud, tax evasion and corruption,” said Nor Shamsiah at the 11th International Conference on Financial Crime and Terrorism Financing 2019 and the launch of the Malaysia Financial Intelligence Network (MyFINet), here, yesterday.
The move to reduce the daily CTR is aimed at bringing Malaysia’s CTR on par with other countries as the previous threshold was considered too high and disconnected from the size of the country’s economy.
Meanwhile, MyFINet is a public-private partnership (PPP) between law enforcement agencies and financial institutions to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, proliferation of financing and other serious crimes. The police, the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission, the Customs, the Securities Commission and 17 financial institutions are involved in the PPP.
The partnership serves as a platform to share intelligence and issues in managing significant threats to the nation.
This is in tandem with the new global norm of sharing financial intelligence implemented in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, Hong Kong and Singapore.
In his speech at the launch of MyFINet, Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said a key component of PPP models throughout the world was the emphasis on personal data protection and confidentiality, benchmarked against the European Union General Data Protection Regulation.
He said law enforcement and financial institutions would continue to adhere to Malaysia’s data protection legal framework in combating financial crimes.