200 Kazakhstan companies checked for implication in financing terrorism

The Financial Monitoring Commission of Kazakhstan Finance Ministry suspected 200 companies and persons of implication in financing terrorism, Tengrinews.kz reports citing deputy General Prosecutor of Kazakhstan Iogan Merkel as saying at the international conference called Countering terrorism in the modern world. “Since its creation, the commission provided the law-enforcement and special authorities with over 190 materials on organizations and persons allegedly involved in laundering of criminal money and financing terrorism. Financial operations were performed and measures were taken on 100 applications of these authorities,” Merkel said. He noted that the problem of financing terrorism remained one of the poorly studied problems these days. But according to Merkel, the capacities of tracking any kinds of transactions of terrorists via financial institutions inside the country and abroad were expanded a lot after the Commission entered the Egmont group (informal division of financial intelligence units). Deputy General Prosecutor also said that amendments were introduced to the Law On countering laundering of illegally received funds and financing terrorism upon an initiative of Kazakhstan General Prosecutor. These amendments made it possible to create lists of companies and persons linked with financing terrorism. “These lists will be formed in the General Prosecutor’s office based on the information provided by special and law-enforcement authorities,” Merkel said. “This doesn’t mean that we will include anyone we want into the list. It doesn't work this way, of course. All the information will be re-checked and we will be filing requests to the Financial Monitoring Commission based on this data,” he explained. By Aidana Ussupova