Daily Archives: April 26, 2014

By William K. Black

I’m writing on the flight returning from the XII^th International CIFA Forum in Monaco. CIFA is an NGO.  It is a confederation of independent financial advisor organizations that works with the UN in promoting the protection of investors.  This means that their clients are often very wealthy and that many of the participants are speakers are very conservative or libertarians (or an admixture).  One of the speakers, Dr. Hans Geiger, gave an impassioned denunciation of “bureaucrats” (which turned out to mean anyone who worked for the government) and the imposition of a duty on bankers to file criminal referrals when they had a “reasonable suspicion” that their clients had committed certain crimes.  The official U.S. jargon for a criminal referral is “Suspicious Activity Reports” (SARS).  Geiger was particularly distressed that the banker would not be allowed to inform his client that he was making the criminal referral (which FATF terms “Suspicious Transaction Reports” (STRs)) under the standard 21 proposed by the Financial Action Task Force in 2012.

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