Sharing of money laundering knowledge with NCIA

Nordiana Shafiee

UUM News Editor, Journalist

SIMPANG AMPAT: A talk entitled ‘Money Laundering: What Should You Know? And Why Is It Important?’ by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Azira Abdul Adzis has opened the eyes of employees of the Northern Corridor Implementation Authority (NCIA) about the issue of money laundering that is becoming increasingly worrying in this country.

Money laundering is a process of converting cash, funds, or property derived from criminal activities to give it a legitimate appearance. It is a process to clean ‘dirty’ money in order to disguise its criminal origin.

Azira said, Malaysians need to know about the issue of money laundering that is becoming increasingly worrying.

The Senior Lecturer of the School of Economics, Finance, and Banking has shared knowledge with the participants about the concept of money laundering, the AMLATFPUAA Act 2001, customer policy, customer due diligence (CDD), suspicious transaction report (STR), and case studies that involve money laundering.

Money laundering can be detrimental to a country’s economy. In addition, it can be challenging for legitimate activities to compete. Therefore, we, as Malaysians, need to know how to overcome money laundering and learn how to identify people who launder money.

According to her, if the issue is not given serious attention, it is not impossible that the public sector will also be targeted by these criminals to ‘launder’ their illegal money.

Azira (center) with the NCIA staff who attended the talk entitled ‘Money Laundering: What Should You Know? And Why Is It Important?’.

The talk, held at NCER Penang recently, was also attended by the Chief Executive of NCIA, Mohamad Haris Kader Sultan and the top management of NCIA as well as heads of departments and units.

A total of 206 NCIA employees from the Northern Region attended the talk which was held in a hybrid format.

NCIA is a statutory body responsible for providing direction and formulating policies and strategies that encourage and accelerate the development of NCER. It also was formed to facilitate the region’s development by engaging and complementing the Federal and State Agencies in implementing strategic, high-impact and catalytic projects to spur socio-economic development.

Established in 2008 under Act 687, NCIA catalyses and implements high value-added development projects and programmes and also promotes private sector participation in the northern region.