New regulation against money laundering in Morocco with a view to repressing criminals or organizations

Abstract

Today’s world is increasingly complexed and disrupted by various changes. All companies and their managers are faced with this increasing complexity and must consider the occurrence of crises. Even more so, the COVID-19 pandemic, which is accompanied by challenges, human suffering and economic turmoil around the world, is an opportunity for criminals to take advantage of all possible ways to come to their ends.

As a result, this context of health crisis, with a very strong economic and managerial impact, has had a lasting impact on management, as companies are faced with new legislation imposed by the regulatory authorities responsible for combating money laundering and terrorist financing and they must not only respect them but also adapt to them to keep growing.

That said, this organizational change must be carefully managed in order to keep the business going and not depreciate it.

Our research aims to effectively assess the compliance of financial institutions with targeted financial sanctions obligations, analyse the lasting impact on management and identify gaps and vulnerabilities that need to be addressed to strengthen the national legislative mechanism and protect the financial sector from the use of capital for illicit purposes.

Similarly, this work was carried out with an inductive approach requiring a qualitative research method which focused on the evaluation of the application of the new provisions introduced by Law 12.18 on the fight against money laundering and financing of terrorism, beside eight financial institutions, including four banks and four insurance and reinsurance companies in Casablanca (Morocco), through eight open-ended semi-directive interviews.

Our work has exposed the practical constraints of exercising compliance control in terms of AML/CTF, particularly as regards the unavailability of AML/CTF risk detection or filtering tools, the lack of staff training and the lack of adequate resources and skills for compliance monitoring.