Q How do you regard claims that Dubai is a centre for money laundering?
A It’s just a myth because there is no more money laundering in Dubai than anywhere else. Money that comes through the UAE on its way to Afghanistan or Pakistan comes from another market, which means other markets have to have greater control over their local affairs.
If a money-launderer comes to the UK and deposits money, how can a banker in the UAE know that it is dirty money rather than the banker in the UK? Which institution has greater responsibility, the one who sends the money or the one who receives it?
We have had systems in place for a long time to send reports on suspicious transactions. We have a Financial Intelligence Unit; we are members of the Egmont Group, enabling us to exchange information on suspicious transactions; and we comply with the Financial Action Task Force’s money laundering directives.
Q Do you think that Dubai is unfairly stigmatised?
A Yes, we expect western newspapers to be biased when it comes to judging us, judging our systems, or judging the capabilities of the systems that we have.
If you look at the technical reports that have been written on our systems, you get a much better understanding of our capabilities than you do from newspapers.
Q How does a country like Abu Dhabi deal with terrorist financing?
A Terrorist financing poses a problem because you don’t know about terrorist financing unless terrorism takes place. Unless you know of somebody connected to terrorism from a previous case, pinpointing the finance is very difficult. In the case of terrorism, it is always clean money that goes for a dirty purpose.
When someone comes to transfer money and his papers are in order, if he has no record or anything suspicious about him there is little you can do to prevent him from transferring the money. The best way of stopping the sending of terrorist money is by getting intelligence about what the group at the receiving end plans to do with the money. But that is the primary responsibility of the locality at the receiving end, not at this end. They should monitor people’s behaviour better.
Q To what extent have moneychangers in the UAE been witting or unwitting recipients of laundered money or terrorist money?
A We started looking at this issue long before 11 September. We have three things in the UAE that we examine very carefully: first we look at money transferred by wire transfers from abroad; second, we look at cash shipped into the country; third, we look at dirty money made locally.
The last is the least of our problems because we don’t have a big drug problem here, and we have tough penalties. The penalty for smugglers is severe, for distributors it is severe and for users it is also severe.
When it comes to dealing with arms, we don’t produce any arms, and we don’t ship them back and forth. We are also in control when it comes to the smuggling of human beings. Nobody enters the UAE without a passport and nobody exits without a passport.
You will also know that Abu Dhabi has implemented registration for hawaladars, ensuring that this system behaves properly.
This requires hawaladars to report suspicious transactions like every other financial institution.
