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Sunday, August 15, 2004
RP financial sleuth stalks terrorists, drug dealers (11:10 am)
MANILA -- Vicente Aquino patrols an obscure front of the war on terror in the Philippines, fighting alongside a platoon of accountants.
Working in a secluded wing of the Central Bank of the Philippines complex, Aquino and his Anti-Money Laundering Council sleuths pore over reams of wire transfers trying to isolate the drug dealers, kidnappers and pyramid-scheme scammers from legitimate businesses.
They are also "looking into" the accounts of entities suspected as conduits of terrorist funds. Aquino declines to discuss specific cases.
"Our job entails a lot of risks, grave risks," he told AFP in an interview.
"We are up against money launderers, organized crime groups and even financiers of terrorists."
The 45-member staff receives daily death threats by telephone, he said.
Formed after the Philippines passed a landmark anti-money laundering law in October 2001, the council is the government's financial intelligence agency.
Aquino, a former university lecturer who began his law enforcement career as a tough-as-nails state prosecutor in Manila, became the council secretariat's first executive director after a stint as head of the central bank's special operations section.
He completed a financial investigators' course at the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) academy in Virginia in 2002.
"We'd rather do our job quietly and discreetly, without fanfare. We are more comfortable with that," he said.
"We still have some vacant positions to be filled up and we are in the process of recruiting qualified people."
The agency monitors millions of transaction reports from banks, securities dealers and brokers, insurance companies and other financial institutions -- all mandated to report transactions that exceed the 500,000-peso (about 9,000-dollar) daily threshold.
Number-crunching computers and certified public accountants and information technology experts analyze patterns "in the hope that we will find something suspicious, which will trigger an investigation and possible prosecution," Aquino said.
The agency has frozen accounts worth a billion pesos (17.85 million dollars), and recently helped British police track down and repatriate 750,000 dollars in pyramid scam accounts.
Its lawyers have filed criminal cases in court against 25 suspected money launderers and civil forfeiture cases against 23 other accounts.
The council has yet to lose a case.
Aquino, a beefy 52-year-old, likens himself to a fisherman, trawling in a large body of water that is the global financial system.
"No system is perfect, but we and the covered institutions are doing our best to make sure all our nets do not have any holes and do not allow the fish to escape," he said.
Congress has yet to pass an anti-terrorism law, but Aquino said his agency is providing intelligence to counterpart agencies abroad under a special authority from President Arroyo.
Aquino also regularly sends out staff abroad to study at FBI-run training courses on international law enforcement.
The southern Philippines, home to a decades-old Muslim separatist rebellion, is considered a training ground of Southeast Asian militants allied to the Al-Qaeda network.
Over the past year, the military and police there have arrested three suspected terrorist financiers who laundered about 75,000 dollars through banks and at least one money-changer shop.
Despite the council's efforts, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an anti-money laundering initiative of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, still lists the Philippines as a money laundering haven alongside the likes of Myanmar and Nigeria.
"We don't deserve to be in that list anymore because we have actually addressed all the concerns of the FATF," Aquino said. AFP
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