The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR) is a Southeast Asian country, situated next to Thailand and Vietnam. The American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative’s (ABA ROLI) programming in Lao PDR has focused on strengthening anti-money-laundering (AML) legal frameworks, data management, and open-source intelligence (OSINT) through two regional programs—the Transnational Anti-Money Laundering Assistance Program (TAMLA)–Disrupting Money Laundering Through the Casino Sector (AML Gambling Program) in Southeast Asia and Vietnam; and the Case-Based Training on Intel-Led Money Laundering Investigations Across the Balkans and Southeast Asia (ILFI) program.
Lao PDR Background
Under the TAMLA program, with funding from the US Department of State Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Office of Global Programs and Policy (INL/GPP), ABA ROLI provides governments, AML regulators and supervisors, with tools and capacity building assistance to strengthen legal frameworks governing AML in the casino sector, to enhance casino-sector money laundering risk assessments, to improve the supervision of casino sector AML controls, and to support casino and online gaming operators to meet their AML obligations. Since the program began in 2020, ABA ROLI has been successfully providing technical assistance to both regulators and reporting entities in Vietnam, Thailand, and Lao PDR, to strengthen their AML legal frameworks and provide tailored training on these frameworks as well as other regional and international instruments, such as the guidelines under the Financial Action Task Force.
Funded by INL, the ILFI program was a dynamic, multi-regional effort to strengthen AML legal frameworks. ABA ROLI has provided a combination of multilateral and country-level assistance to governments and financial investigators to build Financial Intelligence Unit and investigator capacity to use available open-source intelligence data to identify money laundering trends, detect money laundering, and bolster investigations and prosecutions. 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.