The American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative’s (ABA ROLI) Case-Based Training on Intel-Led Money Laundering Investigations Across the Balkans and Southeast Asia (ILFI) program was a dynamic, multi-regional effort to strengthen anti-money laundering legal frameworks. ABA ROLI provided a combination of multilateral and country-level assistance to governments and financial investigators to build Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) and investigator capacity to use available OSINT (open-source intelligence) data to identify money laundering trends, detect money laundering, and bolster investigations and prosecutions. The ILFI program began in September 2019 and concluded in September 2023. ABA ROLI implemented the program across the Balkans and Southeast Asia, specifically in Thailand, Lao PDR, Indonesia, the Philippines, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and the Pacific Islands. This program was funded by the US Department of State Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL).
Case-Based Training on Intelligence-Led Money Laundering Investigations Across the Balkans and Southeast Asia
The program aimed to:
- Improve investigative analysis tools and techniques and investigation planning and casework skills.
- Share successful examples of proactive public-private financial information sharing and methods to create a shared understanding of financial crime risks and typologies between law enforcement agencies and financial institutions.
- Strengthen multi-agency cooperation and coordination within governments, including intelligence-led identification and disruption of the most harmful offenders and facilitators of financially motivated crime, and the implications for AML/CFT regulatory oversight.
- Advance measures to improve the confiscation of criminal funds flowing through the international financial system, including non-conviction-based asset forfeiture.
- Improve the knowledge of financial investigators and law enforcement of virtual asset regulations, trading methods, and how to detect, counter and investigate illegal usage of virtual assets and address the challenges linked with the seizure and confiscation of virtual assets.
In this final year of implementation of the ILFI program, ABA ROLI organized three ILFI workshops on the Intel-Led Financial Investigations Model in the in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Philippines (featured here and here), and Indonesia for more than 80 representatives of FIU, Prosecutor’s General Office and anti-corruption agencies. The three-day workshop in the Republic of the Marshall Islands was the first-ever workshop ever conducted in the country on financial investigations and disruption of financial crime as noted in the press-release via the US Embassy. The workshop in Pacific Islands brought together FIUs from often overlooked countries in the Pacific—including Palau, Kiribati, and the Federated States of Micronesia. Given the wide disparity in the level of experience between different jurisdictions on this issue, ABA ROLI adapted its training offerings to fit the needs of FIUs. ABA ROLI designed and delivered tailored Advanced Data Analytics training for the staff of North Macedonia FIU in June 2023; and two Tracing, Analyzing and Investigating of Virtual Assets training sessions for financial investigators in Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Philippines.