ABCON President,Aihaji Aminu Gwadabe
The Association of Bureaux De Change Operators of Nigeria (ABCON) and the Nigeria Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) have pledged to collaborate within the combat against drug trafficking and money laundering.
This follows, a courtesy go to by NDLEA officers to the National Secretariat of ABCON, throughout which areas of mutual curiosity within the combat against drug trafficking and money laundering had been mentioned.
ABCON President, Alhaji Aminu Gwadabe, stated the affiliation will work with NDLEA to organise sensitisation workshops for BDCs on the connection between drug trafficking and money laundering.
“Part of our role is ensuring compliance and one of our challenges is the vulnerability of BDCs and that is why we keep training our members on issues like customer identification as required under the “Know Your Customer” precept.
“We take into account it vital that we all know our clients. One of the explanation why BDCs are susceptible is as a result of the proceeds of medication are large, as drug enterprise is in billions of and we deal in , therefore we're very susceptible.
“The perpetrators, who've this proceed can run into our places of work and that's the reason our members actually need to supply info that may assist the company to hint the perpetrators. So, we'd associate with the NDLEA to coach our members on these issues they should be careful for to establish suspicious transactions.
“Though we have training programmes with the Nigeria Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) and Economic and Financial Crimes (EFCC) on these issues, we would also partner NDLEA to organise trainings and would request for resource persons from the agencies to participate in our periodic trainings,” he stated.
Gwadabe famous that empowering BDCs against actions of drug traffickers and money launderers is crucial given the crucial function of the trade within the economic system.
He famous that along with offering retail international trade providers to travellers, BDCs assist in attaining international trade stability, whereas the trade present jobs for about 16,000 Nigerians.
Leader of the NDLEA delegation, a Director Director, Nicholas Ajadurumye, acknowledged that although BDCs are underneath the regulation of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), their actions have a bearing on the job of the NDLEA, including that it's the rationale for the go to.
He acknowledged that the company will work with ABCON to teach BDCs on sure obligations which have bearing on the warfare against drug trafficking and money laundering.
As acknowledged by him, certainly one of these obligations is report preserving. He stated drug traffickers of their efforts to launder the proceeds of their crimes operates in money, and so they normally keep away from companies that preserve meticulous information and paperwork of transactions, whereas preferring companies that offers in money and doesn't preserve report of transactions.
He also stated that NDLEA and ABCON wanted to work collectively to sensitise BDCs on the significance of report preserving as a method of defending their companies from transactions primarily based on proceeds of crimes like drug trafficking.