According to the Annual Report of the Financial Information Unit (UIF) 2022 of Angola, made public this Monday, the aforementioned institutions contain indicators of "suspicion, models of action or behavior, schemes that may be ongoing or may occur money laundering crimes of capital, terrorist financing or other predicate crime".
"These indicators result from the observation of different movements as well as different behaviors in different concrete situations", says the report to which Lusa had access.
The study groups the aforementioned indicators by area of activity or branch of activity, namely banks and non-bank financial institutions linked to currency and credit, "resulting from declarations of suspicious transactions and declarations identifying designated persons".
"A potential client has a large amount of money in their possession and opens several accounts; a client structures an operation in order to divide the total value into several operations of smaller amounts, in order to prevent the established limits from being exceeded", exemplifies.
In relation to non-banking financial institutions linked to insurance and social security activities, the UIF report highlights that, in this segment, the customer "is more interested in the cancellation conditions than in the benefits of the policy (return of the amount invested after the cancellation)".
The client "opens and closes policies regularly for no apparent reason", he points out.
The report also highlights several types of operations or activities suspected of money laundering at the level of non-banking institutions linked to the capital market and investment.
In this segment, the client "deposits physical securities (such as a certificate of participation in an organization) along with a request to register the shares in several accounts that do not appear to be related, either to sell or to transfer ownership of the shares."
According to the UIF, the purchase of chips in cash or through a casino account, followed by the redemption of their value, using bank checks within the same chain of casinos, is included in suspected money laundering operations at casino level. including online, and entities paying betting or lottery prizes.
Precious metals and precious stones traders also carry out actions suspected of money laundering, such as in operations where, highlights the UIF, the client buys high-value precious stones, without having any specifications as selection criteria.
The UIF 2022 Annual Report also lists the activities of lawyers, notaries, accountants and other legal professionals as sectors where "guiding criteria for suspecting clients who conduct their business relationships or request services in unusual or unconventional circumstances" can be found.
Customers who request the reception and transmission of funds, through accounts that are not under their control, customers who carry out unusual financial transactions of unknown origin and customers who open or develop a company whose growth is very fast, are identified as operations underlying money laundering of capital.
