Govt expresses commitment to fight against illegal activities - Tengku Zafrul

Speaking at the Annual Meeting of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) here today, Finance Minister Tengku Datuk Seri Zafrul Abdul Aziz said in particular, there is an ongoing project to recover RM5 billion within five years of loss of revenue arising from the smuggling of cigarettes and liquor.

"Our fight against these high-risk crimes will continue to be supported by strong collaboration across enforcement agencies and the financial intelligence community.

"Overall, I would like to stress that these commitments across the government agencies are bearing fruit, whereby in 2021, the disclosures of suspicious transaction reports had successfully resulted in 70 arrests of various offences, RM136 million of criminal proceeds being frozen or seized, and revenue recovery of more than RM255 million, " he said.

He noted that the World Governance Indicator also shows that Malaysia has improved its percentile ranking from the past 10 years in the voice and accountability, regulatory quality, rule of law and control of corruption dimensions.

"Similarly, we rank higher compared to the average East Asian and Pacific regions especially in the government effectiveness and regulatory quality dimensions.

"Recognising the importance of a whole-of-government approach, we have expanded our National Coordination Committee (NCC) to Counter Money Laundering to 17 agencies and ministries, without which, effective Anti Money Laundering/Countering Financing of Terrorism efforts in Malaysia will not be possible," he said.

Tengku Zafrul said the NCC has endorsed a roadmap that lays out key strategic focus and national action plans for 2021-2023 which will be undertaken by both the public and private sectors.

"Recognising the need to combat more sophisticated financial crimes in the future, the roadmap willalso push for greater application of data science or technology-based solutions to improve our surveillance and intelligence tools.

"MyFINet is our existing public-private partnership platform that currently focuses on corruption, smuggling, securities-related offences as well as terrorism and terrorism financing," he added.

Moving forward, he said the scope of MyFINet will be expanded to address other high-riskcrimes identified in the National Risk Assessment.