Last July, the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., received a standing ovation from lawmakers in Manila when he announced a ban on gambling operators that cater to offshore clients – and that also run online scams and launder money illegally.
“The grave abuse and disrespect to our system of laws must stop,” he said. Government raids then led to more than 20,000 of these foreign operators fleeing the country.
That step, in addition to other reforms aimed at ending the Philippines’ reputation as a haven for “dirty money,” helped push the Southeast Asian nation into a special status: Last month, it was taken off a “grey list” of countries that fail to do enough in preventing money laundering, including the financing of terrorism, weapons sales, child sexual exploitation, and other crimes.
The Philippines is now one of many places trying to rely on honesty and transparency in its financial and trading system – or norms set by a global body, the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force.
In the last 12 years, the Paris-based FATF has seen a marked rise in the number of low- and middle-income countries removed from its grey list. They are now in technical compliance with the body’s standards, although full implementation of reforms is mixed.
“There are fewer dark spots on the map,” stated a December report from the Basel Institute on Governance.
Most of the progress has been in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The countries on the FATF “black list” are Iran, North Korea, and Myanmar. These countries’ peoples are subject to the severest restrictions in international banking, trade, and investment.
An estimated 2.7% of the global economy passes through illicit money flows. But as FATF President Elisa de Anda Madrazo told Money Laundering Bulletin, she has lately seen countries “have better development, have better investment, have less corruption, and can put the money where it’s more needed.”
In other words, integrity pays.
