Arun Jaitley to inaugurate conference on dealing with illicit fund flows

New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley will Monday inaugurate an international conference which will discuss scope for regional cooperation to effectively deal with illicit financial flows, mainly from tax frauds and human trafficking.

The three-day conference titled 'Networking the Networks' would try to identify best practices of existing international organisations for cooperation on illicit financial flows, the Finance Ministry said in a statement.

With South Asia being vulnerable to illicit financial flows from drugs, human trafficking and tax fraud, informal money transfer systems are also popular and can be easily misused by the criminal networks for the transfer of crime proceeds, as well as for terrorism financing.

"One of the ways to effectively combat the criminal networks is to disrupt their financial flows. But the criminal networks are of transnational nature and money movements are executed very fast.

"So to combat these criminal networks and their illicit financial flows, law enforcement agencies need fast operational cooperation with their foreign partners, and capacities to deal with the financial crimes," it said.

The conference would also deal with setting-up of regional coordination mechanism for intelligence sharing in criminal matters.

Currently there are different regional organisations for law enforcement cooperation-- Central Asian Regional Information and Coordination Center (CARICC), Southeast European Law Enforcement Center (SELEC).

"But their capacities are not fully utilised for tracing of illicit financial flows and for the law enforcement ? financial intelligence cooperation," it said.

The meeting would discuss the use of the capacities of these networks to disrupt organised crime and the illicit financial flows related to it through the exchange of intelligence and providing platform for coordination of joint/parallel operations, the statement added.

The conference would also produce recommendations on best practices and solutions which can be applied to the nascent South Asia Regional Information and Coordination Center (SARICC).

The proposal to hold this conference was agreed during the last visit of the Executive Director, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to India in December, 2014 and his meeting with the Revenue Secretary.

UNODC has already expressed readiness to further extend support to India and the region in countering trans-national organised crime and promoting drug prevention, treatment and care among vulnerable population groups.