The National Bank of Ukraine continues to provide the law enforcement bodies with information that may be indicative of organized criminal activities and can be used to detect, stop and prevent such activities.
Over 9 months of 2017, the NBU has sent 28 letters to law enforcement bodies to report on suspicious financial transactions by customers of 36 banks amounting to the total of UAH 67.5 billion, USD 16 billion, and EUR 10 million.
Among other, the NBU sent one notification on suspicious financial transactions to the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine and two notifications to the National Police of Ukraine on forgery of the NBU individual license to open an account outside Ukraine and forgery of the NBU individual license to export investment metals abroad.
The information sent to the law enforcement bodies mostly concerned bank customers’ financial transactions of such nature or implying such consequences that might relate them to capital withdrawal, legalizing criminal proceeds, converting cashless funds into cash, fictitious entrepreneurship, and tax evasion.
The total amount of suspicious financial transactions reported to the law enforcement bodies over 9 months of 2017 was over 30 times larger than the amount of transactions reported during the same period of 2016. At that, some of the suspicious financial transactions reported in 2017 were detected during last year’s inspections by the NBU.
According to statistical reports on AML/CFT issues submitted by banks to the NBU, over 9 months of 2017, banks reported over 5.7 million financial transactions subject to AML/CFT monitoring to the State Financial Monitoring Service of Ukraine, which was almost 11% more than the same period last year (5.1 million).
The major share of the reported transactions (over 90%) were financial transactions with cash and financial transactions by persons for whom banks defined a high exposure according to article 15 of the Law of Ukraine On the Prevention and Counteraction to Legalizing (Laundering) the Proceeds from Crime, Terrorism Financing, and Financing the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.