Haiti, Democratic Republic of Congo and Myanmar are identified as the three highest-risk jurisdictions in the latest Basel Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Index.
Established in 2012, the index provides holistic money laundering and terrorist financing risk scores based on data from 17 publicly available sources including the Financial Action Task Force, Transparency International, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.
However, when each money laundering hotspot is assessed on the basis of the percentage of GDP attributed to domestic money laundering, throughflow activity and the laundering of foreign money, the picture changes, as shown below, with small and offshore jurisdictions replaced by much larger economies in the highest-risk positions.
The analysis, carried out by Credas Technologies, also shows that most money laundering in a country is the result not of domestic criminal activity but of illicit funds being moved to that country in order to be laundered before being re-exported once they are ‘clean’.
More information
Read the Basel AML Index of global rankings
Click here for ACCA anti-money laundering guidance
