Compliance Officers are Almost Never Promoted Within Their Companies – Why?

Article by Yana Afanasieva

Compliance officers are almost never promoted within their companies and have to change jobs to get ahead – it’s just statistics. Since I often help my FinTech founder clients to interview their compliance leaders and regularly give feedback about their existing teams, I think I have a perspective.

Most compliance experts believe that their success is determined by:

  • How well they know the laws and regulations, and
  • How hard they work (hard work here means long hours, lots of stress, little support, and plenty of uncertainties)

…And I’m going to argue that hard work and deep knowledge will rarely if ever get you a promotion within compliance.

Yes, you need to know the laws and put in some effort, sure, but your success and career progress within FinTech will have almost nothing to do with knowledge, stress, and long hours.

The finTech industry is very competitive, and it struggles with profitability and scaling challenges. Founders and investors alike are looking for compliance to help to solve these two problems (profitability and scale) and there is only one efficient way to approach it – manage and deliver compliance projects as agile and lean tech projects. If you look at your compliance role as a “job” and a series of tasks and activities, you’ll likely never get ahead, because you won’t be delivering what your management expects you to deliver. Management does not want perfect compliance, they want things done (yesterday), more customers, more investors, more revenues.

The compliance function is not just onboarding, scanning, monitoring, approving, or risk rating customers or producing reports (this is pre-2008 crisis old-fashioned thinking if you ask me).

In 2021 and beyond, the compliance function is normally expected to deliver 1-2 large projects a year (new license, the launch of new products, new partnership, implementation of future PSD3…) and everything that happens must be subordinated to these goals.

Let’s look at a licensing project as an example.

I’d like to suggest that the only way to efficiently and cost-effectively go about securing a financial license with all the resources, time and team constraints is to establish it as a lean-agile project and manage it as a lean-agile project.

What I mean by this is the following: you need to understand the phases of your project (the application process in this case) and what actions and deliverables will help you make progress at each phase, and you focus on what is important at each phase.

When you concentrate on the right sequence of deliverables during the right time of the licensing process, and you know your next milestone, you can track your progress better, you can plan resources better and you no longer need to chase down millions of different ghosts, perceived problems, and non-essential issues that are likely not even relevant. Plus, if you never managed a large-scale compliance project, such as securing a license, you won’t be seriously considered for the CCO role in this day and age.

You may be arguing in your head – “but that’s not compliance role to manage projects and plan resources, I need a business owner or a project manager to do that…”

Well, think again. Your management and founders think it is the compliance leader who should be driving this because they don’t fully understand the risks and consequences, so you really have two options:

  • Either you learn how to manage and deliver compliance projects as a new generation compliance leader, or
  • You will keep failing and changing jobs

Think local, act global? Designing multi-jurisdictional compliance programmes

Compliance professionals in many large organizations face a dilemma: is it possible to maintain the clarity of a single global compliance policy while complying with increasingly divergent local laws?

As many KYC360 readers will know from their own experience, having jurisdiction-specific compliance policies subordinate to global standards can be more trouble than it’s worth: the more intricate the policy structure, the more confusing it is for our colleagues. (And let’s be frank among colleagues: not even we enjoy reading long compliance documents.) At the same time, jurisdictions are increasingly passing legislation that tends towards divergence, not convergence. So is it possible to comply with all relevant laws without driving everyone crazy? This article compares different approaches across several otherwise similar markets, to highlight the issues at play.

The basic dilemma

Carrying out global business in compliance with local statutory requirements is a challenge to any corporation with cross-border operations. The emerging trend of country-specific anti-corruption laws is a significant compliance related development to be tackled in international business. The feedback received from international organizations such as the OECD when conducting their evaluation rounds has led to many jurisdictions not being satisfied with merely criminalizing bribery related offences, but also imposing an obligation for corporations to adopt a compliance program with certain minimum requirements.

In jurisdictions like the UK or the US this is already old news, and now it seems that continental Europe is following the regulatory trend. It goes without saying that the content of the regulations varies jurisdiction by jurisdiction, putting international companies in the crossfire of several different and potentially conflicting regulations.

The wide range of statutory requirements

In some jurisdictions, an adequate compliance program (for example, a proportionate policy, real implementation, a whistleblowing facility that works and a decent standard adequate level of internal controls) may be mandatory as a term of a financial services licence. In others, its existence might serve as a defence to a prosecution of a legal person under anti-corruption or fraud law (as in the UK), or at least as a mitigation of associated penalties (as in the USA). Consequently, corporations operating in these jurisdictions are usually willing to attempt to put such a system in place. (Whether those programs are any good is a different question: Eversheds Sutherland’s research shows that only 41% of managers think that their company’s anti-bribery programme works well in practice.)

However, there are many jurisdictions without any statutory obligation to adopt a compliance program. The structure and content of the legislation thus varies country by country.

Let us consider whistleblowing regulations in the Nordic countries (despite them ranking high in anti-corruption statistics) as an example. In Finland, there is no specific anti-corruption code imposing obligation to adopt a statutory anti-corruption compliance program. The Government is in the early stages of preparing legislation for protection of whistleblowers, but no bill has yet been prepared. Bribery and related offences are criminalized as in any other OECD member country, but implementing a statutory compliance program with certain checks and balances is by no means a legal obligation. In neighbouring Norway there is a statutory obligation to adopt a whistleblowing system for e.g. anti-corruption purposes (Arbeidsmiljöloven 2005). In Sweden, new legislation that entered into force in January 2017, provides for more efficient protection for whistleblowers (Lag (2016:749) om särskilt skydd mot repressalier för arbetstagare som slår larm om allvarliga missförhållanden). In Denmark, there is no special legislation protecting whistleblowers as such, but there is a statutory obligation for financial services businesses to have a whistleblowing channel in place (lov om financiel virksomhed).

More recently, some jurisdictions have gone even further: they now oblige all corporations to have compliance programs in place and prescribe key elements, with a particular emphasis on whistleblowing. It seems that the practice of adopting a separate anti-corruption code with provisions on compliance programs and whistleblowing is spreading from the UK and the US reaching continental Europe.

An example of a country that has recently followed this trend is France. Mostly inspired by the UK Bribery Act and triggered by the criticism from the OECD, the new French anti-corruption legislation known as Sapin II (Loi Sapin II pour la transparence de la vie économique”) provides a new set of legal obligations that will significantly impact companies operating in France and their directors. As of 1 June 2017, medium to large companies and their directors will be required to implement a French specific compliance program against corruption and trading in influence in order to comply with Sapin II. Further, Sapin II obliges the companies to inter alia adopt a whistleblowing procedure, due diligence of major clients, suppliers or similar and implement accounting and auditing controls. Failure to comply with these new provisions is punishable under law.

Escaping the requirements of various jurisdictions is not easy. All OECD Member Countries have undertaken to implement a wide extraterritorial jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute cross-border bribery related offences when ratifying the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. Same applies to the UN Convention against Corruption. And if these provisions appear increasingly hard to encapsulate when they emerge from jurisdictions that are fundamentally similar (France, Sweden, Finland etc), then it’s going to be even harder to do so when they emerge from jurisdictions like Nigeria or China.

What this means for businesses is that even a remote link to some country may trigger the jurisdiction of the local authorities to investigate and prosecute a corruption related offence. Looking at the issue from the perspective of business compliance, the statutory requirements in all such potentially affected countries shall be taken into account when designing global policies.

Why would I adopt a compliance program if the law doesn’t impose any obligation to do so?

If a company operates its business only in a jurisdiction which does not impose any obligation to adopt a statutory compliance program, it is still highly recommended to adopt one. A well-functioning compliance program may help in identifying and preventing bribery, which is a criminal offence despite the non-existence of a statutory requirement to run a compliance program.

Compliance programs promote transparency in all corporate operations. These days, compliance, transparency and business ethics are seen as a competitive advantage. Companies with well-functioning compliance programs benefit from risk reduction, cost savings and sustainable growth. Anti-corruption policies and transparency drive performance. Research has shown that companies engaged in sustainability reporting significantly outperform their counterparts over the long term, both in terms of stock market and accounting performance.

How can a company with cross-border operations manage the differing regulations?

It goes without saying that the first step to efficient compliance is awareness of the affected jurisdictions, followed by awareness of the content of relevant legislation. No matter how trivial this may sound, many companies are caught in unawareness when it comes to the law applicable to their business. The most notorious jurisdiction in this regard is probably the US, which assumes the reach of its legislation and jurisdiction of its authorities to investigate and prosecute offences with regards to many foreign businesses with only a remote connection with the US. A jurisdictional link may, for example, be constituted by an interbank payment made in US dollars.

When the applicable regulations have been identified and related obligations mapped, a company should adopt a compliance program to meet the requirements of the regulations. It should be taken into account that, for example. a whistleblowing policy needs to be tailored jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

All compliance policies should be monitored, and practices audited and updated from time to time. As the business grows and expands its presence into new jurisdictions, new compliance requirements may arise. Compliance programs are by no means stable instruments of which the content remains the same for decades.

An efficient policy, put into practice, serves as an excellent tool for preventing criminal behaviour in business operations. It also promotes anti-corruption culture in a company—important because bribery is a criminal offence in all OECD and UN Member Countries, irrespective of whether there exists a statutory obligation to implement a compliance policy.

 

Marja Boman is a Senior Associate in the Helsinki office of Eversheds Sutherland. Qualified in both Finland and England & Wales, she advises corporate clients on issues around bribery, money laundering and regulatory compliance.

Nieuwe publiek-private samenwerking in Fintell Alliance – “Nieuwe boost voor aanpak witwassen”

Vier Nederlandse grootbanken en de Financial Intelligence Unit-Nederland (FIU-Nederland) hebben de handen ineengeslagen in de strijd tegen witwassen en financiering van terrorisme. De publiek-private samenwerking in Fintell Alliance NL kreeg vandaag formeel zijn beslag met de ondertekening van het Alliantiedocument. NVB-voorzitter Chris Buijink en Hennie Verbeek-Kusters, hoofd van de FIU-Nederland koesteren grote verwachtingen: “Uitwisseling van kennis betekent een nieuwe boost voor de aanpak van witwassen.”

 

Aan de ondertekening van het Alliantiedocument ging twee jaar voorbereiding vooraf. In 2018 startte de FIU-Nederland een pilot met de Volksbank. Omdat de samenwerking en de resultaten als zeer positief werden ervaren, volgde uitbreiding van de publiek-private samenwerking met ING, Rabobank en ABN AMRO onder de naam Fintell Alliance NL. Een (vooralsnog bescheiden) team van medewerkers afkomstig van alle partijen deelt (tijdelijk onderbroken door de coronapandemie) fysiek een kantoor waar de lijnen kort zijn. De gedeelde kennis zal, zo is al gebleken, leiden tot betere meldingen aan de FIU-Nederland en aansluitend de opsporingsinstanties, maar ook tot betere inzichten in nieuwe fenomenen en trends. Hennie Verbeek-Kusters: “Nu al biedt de samenwerking zicht op netwerken en criminele organisatievormen die we anders hadden gemist.”

Chris Buijink legt uit dat banken door Fintell Alliance NL effectieve feedback krijgen die zij weer kunnen inzetten in het transactiemonitoringsysteem.” De samenwerking zal er mede voor zorgen dat de taken zoals die zijn beschreven in de Wet ter voorkoming van witwassen en financieren van terrorisme (Wwft), zo goed mogelijk worden uitgevoerd en de wettelijke bevoegdheden optimaal worden benut.

Hennie Verbeek-Kusters en Chris Buijink

 

De Wwft verplicht banken ongebruikelijke transacties te melden aan de FIU-Nederland. Ze hebben daarvoor een goed beeld nodig van de klant en het risicoprofiel. Buijink: “Wil een klant geen antwoord geven op de herkomst van het geld? Of niet verklaren waarom hij of zij zoveel contanten wil opnemen? Dat is voor de FIU-Nederland relevante informatie.” De FIU-Nederland analyseert en onderzoekt de gemelde ongebruikelijke transacties. Verbeek-Kusters: “Als wij een transactie uiteindelijk als verdacht aanmerken, sturen we deze met een rapportage door naar een opsporingsdienst of, in geval van mogelijk terrorisme, de veiligheidsdienst.”

Het aantal ongebruikelijke transacties dat de banken in 2019 doorstuurden naar de FIU-Nederland steeg in 2019 fors: van 68.217 naar 155.337. Uit nog ongepubliceerde cijfers blijkt dat de stijging vorig jaar doorzette. De groei is volgens Verbeek voor een deel te verklaren uit een wettelijke aanpassing voor het objectief melden van ongebruikelijke transacties in relatie tot risicolanden. Een ander deel is volgens haar echter “absoluut een opbrengst van de extra inspanningen van de banken”. Van de door de banken gemelde transacties bestempelde de FIU-Nederland er in 2019 12.919 als “verdacht”.

Het doel van de Fintell Alliance NL is vooral het gezamenlijk opbouwen van expertise, onderstreept  Verbeek-Kusters. Ze heeft al ervaren dat dat “fantastisch werkt”. Enthousiast: “Een bankmedewerker vertelde mij: ik zit al tien jaar in het vak, maar heb in de afgelopen maanden meer geleerd dan de tien jaar ervoor. En mijn analisten zeggen: we snappen steeds beter waar de banken tegenaan lopen.”

De samenwerking zal leiden tot ontwikkeling van intelligence- en kennisproducten, waar zowel de FIU-Nederland, de opsporingsdiensten en ook andere banken van kunnen profiteren. Verbeek-Kusters noemt als voorbeeld de inspanningen van de banken mee te werken aan het opsporen van mensenhandel en moderne slavernij, een van de gronddelicten van witwassen. “Het doel van dat project is uiteindelijk een kennisproduct te delen. Fintell Alliance NL levert feitelijke casussen aan die inzichten opleveren waar ook de opsporing mee verder kan.”

Buijink verwacht veel van de interactie tussen Fintell Alliance NL en Transactie Monitoring Nederland (TMNL), waarin de Volksbank, ABN AMRO, Rabobank, ING en Triodos al samenwerken. “De kennis over netwerken en modus operandi die wordt opgedaan in Fintell Alliance NL kunnen leiden tot scenario’s waarmee TMNL de monitoring kan verbeteren.”

Fintell Alliance NL is een voorbeeld van de grote stappen die publieke en private partijen de afgelopen jaren hebben gezet op het gebied van samenwerking in het financieel-economisch domein. En bouwt verder op wat bijvoorbeeld al is uitgewerkt in de Serious Crime Task Force (SCTF), ook een publiek-private samenwerking. “Tien jaar geleden zouden banken samenwerking misschien als een ‘moetje’ hebben gezien”, zegt Buijink. “Dat is echt veranderd. Ook de politiek is in beweging gekomen, met bijvoorbeeld aanpassing van de wet die het delen van gegevens onder voorwaarden mogelijk maakt.” Verbeek-Kusters knikt. “Er is meer politieke lading gekomen. We mogen echt trots zijn op wat Nederland doet op het gebied van monitoring in de strijd tegen witwassen en financiering terrorisme. Collega’s in het buitenland vragen mij regelmatig om onze aanpak toe te lichten. Wij zijn Europees koploper.”

Buijink ziet de komende jaren met vertrouwen tegemoet. “Fintell Alliance NL is opnieuw een bewijs van de inspanningen om gezamenlijk echt een vuist te maken zodat het financiële systeem veilig wordt en veilig blijft.”

Redacteur: Rineke van Houten

Click to see: Infographic Fintell Alliance NL

The Italian Mafia and the Move Upstream

Operation ‘Tiburón Galloway’ began as a local investigation by prosecutors in the Italian region of Calabria in 2001, but quickly snowballed into a multinational, multiagency investigation. Over five years, prosecutors uncovered a vast cocaine trafficking and money laundering conspiracy spanning both Italy and Colombia – and even the retirement plans of one of Colombia’s most notorious warlords.

The investigation into the alliance between Salvatore Mancuso, a commander of Colombia’s paramilitary army, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia – AUC), and the ‘Ndrangheta mafia revealed just how far the Italians had come in the cocaine trade – all the way to the source.

According to reports in the Italian media, the evidence showed the Italians were buying cocaine from Mancuso in Colombia at $3,000 a kilo then organizing its shipment through Colombian ports and via Venezuela to Europe, where it would fetch prices up to 15 times higher on the wholesale market.

Mancuso, in turn, went into the business with the Italians in Colombia, even opening an Italian restaurant in the Caribbean city of Barranquilla frequented by mobsters and local elites alike. And as the paramilitaries negotiated their demobilization with the Colombian government, he sent one of his personal fixers to Italy to scout property deals, according to an investigation by El Espectador. Communications intercepts between ‘Ndrangheta members hinted at why:

“[Mancuso] is at the end of the peace process, and they will surely give him a couple of years in prison, then after he is coming to Italy,” Mancuso’s chief mafia business partner told his son.

Mancuso did not get his retirement in Italy – at least not yet. He was instead extradited to the United States, where he served a 12-year prison sentence on drug trafficking charges.

Since then, the European cocaine trade has changed and evolved. But networks organized along the same lines as the Mancuso mafia ring are becoming more common as ever more European traffickers move upstream in search of cheap cocaine and coordinate its dispatch Europe directly.

Nonetheless, it was the Italians, with their particular brand of organization, entrepreneurship and criminal efficiency, who pioneered the move upstream. And it is still the Italians who have the most far-reaching and sophisticated upstream operations.

Cocaine Brokers and the Criminal Diaspora

Italian involvement in the cocaine trade even pre-dates the rise of the Colombian cartels, with records of mafia members arrested in Brazil for cocaine trafficking as far back as 1972. But at first, cocaine was a minor part of a broad criminal portfolio that included everything from international heroin trafficking to local waste disposal rackets.

When Colombia’s Medellín and Cali cartels began to ramp up cocaine trafficking into Europe in the 1980s, the Italians were among the main wholesale buyers, moving and selling the product that Galician smugglers brought in for the Colombians.

But the Italians’ experience in the heroin business offered them a major competitive advantage over other European mafias getting into the cocaine trade.

“They exported heroin from Europe into the United States so they had a lot of experience and they had established distribution and importation chains,” said Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

The more forward-thinking mafiosi understood that this experience and criminal infrastructure could be used to traffic the cocaine themselves.

“They came to Colombia so they could be closer to the supply and coordinate shipments to their standards,” said Vigil.

By the early 1990s, Italian cocaine brokers were stationing themselves in the country, where they worked quietly reshaping the European cocaine trade. The most infamous was the baby-faced trafficker Roberto Pannunzi, the man dubbed the “Copernicus of Cocaine” by Italian crime writer Roberto Saviano.

Pannunzi’s first realization was that the heroin he had trafficked for years was worth much more to Latin American traffickers than the cocaine they shipped to Europe. As Saviano describes in his book ZeroZeroZero, he began a drug exchange of 1 kilo of heroin for 25 kilos of cocaine. His second realization was that there was far, far more money to be made from cocaine upstream.

By the early 1990s, Pannunzi had leveraged his cartel contacts in Colombia and his mafia contacts in Italy to set himself up as an upstream middleman, establishing himself as one of the original cocaine brokers. He worked for himself, brokering deals between the Medellín Cartel and both the Cosa Nostra and ‘Ndrangheta mafias, but beholden to none of them.

The cartel era was winding down, with the killing of Pablo Escobar in 1994 and the capture of the Cali Cartel bosses in 1995 ushering in a new generation of traffickers and organizations. Pannunzi was captured in Medellín less than two months after Escobar’s death. The police officials arresting him turned down his offer of a million dollars to let him go, according to media reports at the time. Nevertheless, he was released five years later after prosecutors ran out of time to bring their case against him.

By that time, Colombia’s criminal monoliths had splintered into federations of smaller trafficking networks. For the Italian mafia, that represented new opportunities, and their footprint upstream began to grow.

The mafia that proved the most adept at moving in the new cocaine trade was not one of Italy’s infamous and storied mafias like the Cosa Nostra, but the ‘Ndrangheta, a relatively minor federation of family crime clans from the impoverished region of Calabria.

The ‘Ndrangheta plotted a chart upstream by turning a weakness into a strength. Poverty and lack of opportunity drove a mass migration of Calabrians, and among their numbers were ‘Ndrina – the mafia clans that make up the ‘Ndrangheta network.

“Migrants from Calabria created communities around the world and they strengthened the connections with the Calabrian region – this was the first base of their network,” said Alessia Cerantola, an investigative journalist at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and co-founder of the Investigative Reporting Project Italy (IRPI).

These migrant crime clans not only dedicated themselves to crime but also setting up legal businesses as fronts for illegal activity and to launder money. Among them were export companies, which the Italians used to ship cocaine to Europe in cargo and containers – what would become the main method of shipping cocaine to Europe.

This upstream presence allowed the ‘Ndrangheta to cut out the independent brokers and control more of the supply chain directly.

“They have their people in the key positions in the supply chain,” said Cerantola. “This is not only in Italy but also on an international level thanks to the people they located in key strategic roles around the world.”

Italian migration was key to the alliance between the ‘Ndrangheta and Salvatore Mancuso, who was the son of an Italian migrant from the southwestern region of Campania, and came from the city of Monteria in Colombia’s Caribbean, home to a significant Italian diaspora.

Mancuso, though, was far from the only ‘Ndrangheta supplier, as their upstream brokers set to work making other connections, not only with right-wing paramilitaries but also guerrilla insurgents.

By 2006, as the AUC was coming to the end of its demobilization process as part of a peace deal with the Colombian government, the ‘Ndrangheta was handling up to 80 percent of European cocaine imports, according to a report commissioned by Italy’s anti-Mafia commission.

The Italian Mafia and Cocaine Migration

In 2008, Salvatore Mancuso was extradited to the United States for continuing to traffic cocaine after his demobilization, along with 13 other paramilitary commanders. It was a watershed moment for the cocaine trade, as the old guard walked off the criminal stage and a new generation jostled to take their place in the Colombian underworld.

Since then, the European cocaine trade has opened up, both geographically and strategically. Now, there are more routes and more actors involved than ever before. But the Italian mafia remain at the forefront of this expansion.

Police and intelligence sources all around Latin America report their presence. In Brazil, today one of the main dispatch points to Europe, according to Europol, police sources described how they uncovered an alliance between the ‘Ndrangheta and Brazil’s most powerful criminal group, the First Capital Command (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC) in 2017. In Costa Rica, intelligence sources say they are the most common European actor found trafficking in the country, while in Peru, police report that the Italians are among the main financers of cocaine shipments.

Brokers, many of them resident upstream, remain the lynchpin of their operations, with their connections to suppliers and dispatch networks.

“The ‘Ndrangheta have brokers in these countries, typically in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, and these brokers try to organize the sales from these countries using legal businesses,” said Maurizio Catino, an expert on the Italian mafia and author of the book “Mafia Organizations.”

“In these countries, there are ‘Ndrangheta logistics cells for trafficking cocaine through the movement of goods for export to North America and Europe,” he added.

An IRPI and CORRECTIV investigation into one of these brokers, Nicola Assisi, offered a glimpse into how they work.

According to the investigation, Assisi established himself as one of the cocaine world’s leading brokers after he inherited the contact book of the legendary trafficker Pasquale Marando, who had worked alongside Roberto Pannunzi as one of the pioneers of Italian cocaine trafficking. When Marando was murdered by rivals in 2002, Assisi moved to take over the upstream networks he left behind.

Evidence collected by investigators shows how Assisi sources cocaine from suppliers in Peru, Paraguay and Brazil. He then contracts the PCC to move the cocaine to the port of Santos and dispatch it to Europe, where his ‘Ndrangheta clients are waiting.

Assisi, like Roberto Pannunzi before him, is an independent operator rather than a member of an ‘Ndrangheta clan. Most trafficking networks prefer it this way because it avoids the alerts that known mafia members would raise upstream, according to Esteban Chavarría, the head of the anti-narcotics unit of the prosecutors’ office in Costa Rica, where the Italian mafia currently has a major footprint.

“They do not directly form a part of the mafia in Italy, they have not been arrested and they have not been investigated, but they know the Costa Rican market and they come to form this link, a bridge between the mafia and Costa Rica,” Chavarría said.

The relationship between Assisi and the PCC is also typical of today’s Italian trafficking networks, where the brokers contract local criminal groups to handle the export. However, in some cases, the Italians have set up their own front businesses for sending cocaine shipments.

One of these cases ended with murder, when an Italian trafficker who set up a front fruit company in Costa Rica was gunned down in San José after a lost shipment. Chavarría believes it was not an isolated case.

“We are investigating more of these structures that have been set up by Europeans to carry out this type of trafficking,” he said.

Italian mafia operations have been uncovered in many other countries that have become – or are at risk of becoming – major cocaine export platforms supplying the European market, such as Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, SurinameGuyanaUruguayArgentinaBolivia, the Dutch Caribbean, and Chile. The ‘Ndrangheta alone operates in more than 30 countries around the world, according to European police.

However, these networks are far more than just cocaine trafficking cells. They are also master manipulators of illicit finance flows, which they channel through Latin America and the Caribbean. In some places, they have turned their money into power, by spreading corruption and penetrating vulnerable states.

One of the most audacious attempts to coopt upstream states came on the Caribbean island of Curaçao.

After gaining autonomy from the Netherlands in 2010, Curaçao elected Gerrit Schotte as its first prime minister. However, the country’s first independent government was compromised by Francesco Corallo, a casino owner in the region and, according to Italian prosecutors, an international drug trafficker who was an important member of the Sicilian mafia.

Investigations into Schotte revealed how Corrallo bribed the Curaçaoan politician to gain access to confidential government information and to secure the appointment of his relatives and allies in critical positions at the Central Bank, the Gaming Board, and within Schotte’s cabinet. In 2016, Schotte was convicted of forgery, official bribery, and money laundering.

Latin America and the Caribbean are also used as a refuge for Italians mafiosi on the run from the law, needing to lie low or looking to take semi-retirement by laundering money in the sunshine.

Just such a criminal retirement ring was broken up in the Dominican Republic earlier this year, when Interpol arrested eight Camorra fugitives, who had fled Italy after being convicted of crimes ranging from cocaine trafficking to embezzlement. The men – all but one over 50 – were living quiet lives allegedly laundering money through restaurants and tourist businesses.

The Italians are no longer the only European criminals setting up operations upstream. More and more groups – above all from the Balkans – have followed the path they forged upstream to maximize profits from the cocaine trade. Today, it is common to hear of Serbs buying cocaine at the source in Peru, or Albanians organizing shipments through the ports of Ecuador.

However, the Italians’ generations of experience moving both drugs and money, their global networks, and their proven capacity to innovate and adapt will ensure they remain among the most powerful and innovative criminal syndicates, posing serious security threats not only in Europe, but also upstream in Latin America.

*Investigation for this article was conducted by Maria Fernanda Ramírez, Douwe den Held and Owen Boed.

Curaçao past wetgeving witwassen en terrorismefinanciering aan

 

The AML System: A Failure of Statecraft?

 

Top skills that make a good compliance officer

The fundamental duty of a compliance officer is to keep the ethical integrity of a company uninjured.

AML compliance officers and MLROs must make sure that the business activities of the organisation are carried out within a regulatory framework. To accomplish this, the compliance officer must possess a defined set of skills and expertise.

We originally published this list in August 2018 but in October 2020 we put it out to a survey of KYC360 users, asking you to tell us which skills you thought were particularly important. Hundreds of you answered, so thank you. These are the results, in order of importance, as well as some of your other suggestions as to the most important features needed to be a good AML compliance officer.

1. Integrity (59% felt this was particularly important)

Integrity is a must for any profession. Regulation management process can only be implemented and achieved effectively if the officers have strong moral principles and honest qualities. But it’s not just enough to know what the right thing is, it’s about having the courage of your convictions; the confidence to speak out; the determination to see things through. Courage was mentioned again and again by survey respondents, along with resilience, strength and developing a ‘thick skin’ – suggesting how daunting a job in compliance can sometimes feel.

The reassuring aspect is that you’re not alone – thousands of AML professionals are in the similar positions.  99% of the time you’ll know in your gut what the right thing to do is to fulfil your professional, and ethical, requirements. Finding the courage to carry it through is the next step. And the right one.

2. Industry knowledge (56%)

KYC360 itself wouldn’t exist if there weren’t an ongoing need from compliance officers to keep abreast of industry developments. As well as keeping on top of relevant regulatory requirements, professionals should also stay up to speed with the latest tactics and trends in financial crime and money laundering. Criminals are always going to move fast, so to some extent we’re playing catch-up, but we need to keep trying. Never give up.

You can keep abreast of the latest AML news with our daily or weekly emails (sign up here), and you can record your Continuing Professional Development in KYC360’s CPD wallet (register here).

It’s not just industry or regulatory knowledge, that’s important. Many of you mentioned the importance of taking a world view on situations, and encouraged compliance officers to be well-networked and globally connected

3. Risk assessment (55%)

Risk assessment is a vital component of the compliance function. It is important that the compliance officer takes into consideration all the factors that contribute towards risk scoring, and understands the implications of those risk scores for wider business decision-making.

In the survey, you reinforced how important it was not just to understand the risks you were involved in assessing, but how to balance commercial and regulatory risks (and sometimes personal vs business risks). Being able to consider the risk impact of your work in a wider commercial context is invaluable, particularly if you’re aiming to persuade colleagues of a certain course of action.

4. Communication (42%)

Written and verbal communication skills are vital. The compliance officer must have the ability to communicate at all levels in the organisation so that they can share relevant and comprehensive information at the appropriate times. Skills in negotiation (or diplomacy!) can also be useful, and with an approachable manner and a listening ear people won’t be afraid to ask you for help or advice about issues that may be significant.

5. Detail-oriented (28%)

With regulatory requirements changing rapidly, it is crucial that the compliance officer pays attention and understands them in detail. Requirements may be different between jurisdictions; screening tools may have differences in the parameters they apply; suspicious entities may operate under multiple aliases. Whether it’s the technology, the data, or the law, you’ll need to have a good eye for detail.

6. Problem-solving (25%)

Effective problem solving demands a blending of creative and analytical thinking. Compliance officers face the problem of unclear and obscure regulatory policies, cost issues and so on. The compliance officer should be able to identify the risk associated with particular policy-making so that they can draft a simple structured solution.

It helps to actually enjoy solving problems, to be curious and inquisitive about new situations and to be open-minded about possible solutions.

7. Interpret data (24%)

Not all the rules out there are black and white; there will sometimes be grey areas and the ability to create sense and policy out of these can be very useful. Logical analytical skills and critical thinking are valuable – as is (of course) common sense, and sometimes a sprinkling of scepticism…

8. Conflict management (10%)

Last but by no means least, a compliance officer should know how to manage conflict and handle dissension, as there will be times where they may encounter circumstances requiring them to explain and defend their point of view. They should also have confidence and resilience when faced with tough situations and dealing with external agencies such as regulators – as well as when handling internal conflict.

The skills to confidently assert yourself and carry out your job professionally are vital, but don’t neglect your softer side. Being approachable, collaborative and demonstrating good emotional intelligence with your peers and colleagues (both above and below you in the ranks) will stand you in good stead.

What else is important?

Although these attributes are weighted here, many respondents felt that they were all important. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how a good compliance officer could do their job well without needing skills across all eight areas. But if that’s not enough, there were some other key aspects that many of you felt should be highlighted:

  • Support from the top – It can make all the difference to your job satisfaction if you feel truly supported and empowered by senior management. We all know how miserable it can be if you feel you’re fighting internal forces in your effort to do a good job, with integrity, so ensuring you have your boss’s or board’s full support is invaluable.
  • Patience … or persistence / perseverance …. Or all three. Overseeing AML compliance work is not a job with quick wins or one that often delivers immediate results. The fight against financial crime is waged with many tiny decisions, and you may never directly see the impact of your actions. But take heart, as it’s a job worth doing, in particular, if you:
  • Love your job. You’ll rarely get the bonuses of a salesman or the applause of an actor. But that’s why discovering your own satisfaction in your work is so important, whether it’s through well-completed SARs, smoothly managed regulatory inspections, or improvements to internal processes that free up time for your team to concentrate on delivering an excellent client experience. (On that final note, KYC Global’s RiskScreen software is loved by our customers for its easy-to-use interface and up to 95% reduction in false positives – click here to set up a demo!)

Thank you, once again, to everyone who took part in this year’s AML compliance officer survey. For those new to the job, we hope this has been of help. For those already in these posts, we hope it reflects your reality with reasonable accuracy. You’re doing a great job.

By Suresh Chavali (August 2018), updated by KYC360 staff December 2020