Fifth Regional Conference of Heads of FIUs

The Fifth Regional Heads of FIUs Conference was held in Otočec, Slovenia, from 12-14 October 2011, brought the heads of financial intelligence units of Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Croatia, Albania and Serbia. The Serbian delegation consisted of Mr Aleksandar Vujičić, APML director, and Mr Milovan Milovanović, head of the Department for international cooperation, legal and finacial affairs.

Lessons learned so far show that the key to a successful fight against money laundering and terrorist financing as a form of „international business“ lies in a fruitful and continuing cooperation and information exchange amongst the financial-intelligence units, epecially those from the countries in the region..

The following conclusions were adopted at the Fifth Regional HoFIUs Conference:

Cooperation and exchange of information among the members of this regional conference is at a much higher level of cooperation and information exchange as required in the international standards within the Egmont Group. The members of this conference will put their efforts to spreading the influence of this good example of regional coopration to other regions as well as to the entire Egmont Group.

AML/CFT challenges are growing as the money laundering mechanisms are constantly changing  and become more and more sophisticated, forcing the international community to step up their its efforts in detecting and identifying these phenomena. The Conference pointed out to the importance of development of strategic analyses within individual FIUs that wil identify ML/FT trends. Signatory countries expressed their readines to share the outcome of such analyses.

In January 2012, Serbian FIU, in cooperation with the Council of Europe and the World Bank, will initiate its national AML/CFT risk assessment process. Serbian FIU is willing to share the knowledge and experience from the data collection process with the other regional FIUs.

An increase in the number of abuses of new payment methods for ML purposes has been noted, so in future the FIUs will work jointly on FIU education in this area.

Next HoFIUs conference will be held in Macedonia.