The governor of Bangladesh’s central bank has said that he is working closely with counterparts and has introduced a specialist unit to detect trade-based money laundering.

Bangladesh recently announced a new strategy for anti-money laundering (AML) and combating financing of terrorism (CFT) for 2015-2017(AML Newsflow, 17 April 2015).

Monitoring trade transactions
Bangladesh Bank (BB) governor, Dr Atiur Rahman, said the country’s agencies are now actively working with counterparts abroad to recover the proceeds of corruption in terms of the UN Convention Against Corruption.

The governor also said that a new transfer pricing monitoring unit in the National Board of Revenue is monitoring trade transactions to detect illicit outflows through mis-invoicing.

Illicit flows
The central bank chief disclosed these things while speaking at a recent event entitled Addressing the Linkage Illicit Flows and Domestic Resource Mobilisation, organised by Global Financial Integrity (GFI), the Washington-based organisation that aims to curtail illicit financial flows.

The governor agreed with GFI’s findings that illicit outflows totalled more than official development assistance and foreign direct investment (FDI) flows into Bangladesh put together.