The international community is failing to sufficiently police financial transactions that are helping arms dealers sell chemical, biological and nuclear weapons technologies, the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force said in a report to be issued this week (see GSN, April 2).
The 34-member group, established by the Group of Seven industrialized nations, indicated there is a need for increased national legislation against weapons proliferation and sanctions on violators, the Financial Times reported. It studied the issue for a year before completing the report.
Vincent Schmoll, who coordinates the task force's efforts to track money laundering and terror financing developments, called financial networks that enable WMD proliferation "a serious problem."
"We have thought that it was vulnerability for a number of years. This work seems to show that the vulnerability is there," Schmoll said.
The report outlines how weapon traffickers enlist special banking services, and calls on banks and governments to collect more intelligence on traffickers who often obscure their identities and those of their customers.
The task force listed free-trade zones and transshipment hubs in the Netherlands, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates as sites that could serve as arms trafficking centers due to their relatively lax customs regulations. However, the report does not name particular nations that are failing to sufficiently police WMD-linked funding channels (Michael Peel, Financial Times, June 23).