Iran Gov’t Sends AML/CFT Amendments to Majlis

President Hassan Rouhani has presented two bills for making amendments to the current Law of Combating the Financing of Terrorism and the Law of Anti-Money Laundering.

According to the introductory section of both laws published on the official news portal of the administration, reforms to the CFT law are meant to better address the definition and inclusion of terrorism-related crimes, differentiate between people or organizations engaged in terrorism, define the geographical inclusion of prosecuting financing of terrorism within and outside the country and following up on crimes against international organizations without a representative office in Iran.

The reform measures aim to better define examples of national and international terrorist persons, groups and organizations by the Supreme National Security Council, and put in place more efficient regulations to confiscate assets and instruments of terrorism financing.

Reforms to the AML law, on the other hand, target faults, including lack of proportion between crimes and punishments, lack of deterrence and efficiency of punishments, confinement of the crime only to local sources and lack of prosecuting money laundering crimes independent of the original crime.

The reforms also take aim at shortage of executive instruments to confiscate assets and instruments of committing money laundering offenses and the lack of an acceptable operational structure of bodies combating money laundering i.e. the Financial Intelligence Unit affiliated with the Ministry of Economic and Finance Affairs.

The CFT law was first framed and approved close to two years ago, and was subsequently notified by the Cabinet about three weeks ago.

The AML law was initially put in place about 10 years ago and was finally implemented after the Cabinet meeting about two weeks ago.

Iran has been continuously ramping up efforts in line with better adhering to international AML/CFT laws, as it faces scrutiny from the Financial Action Task Force–the intergovernmental group specifically in charge of devising and monitoring the implementation of AML/CFT regulations.

The organization has currently extended the suspension of active countermeasures against Iran until further notice, urging the country to fulfill its commitments by Jan. 31, 2018.