The Action on “Promoting Transparency and Action against Economic Crime” enhanced the knowledge and skills of the Financial Monitoring Agency, financial monitoring entities and regulatory bodies on the topic of transparency of beneficial ownership of legal entities and legal arrangements through a series of training activities on “Transparency of Beneficial Ownership of Legal Entities” on 6-10 March 2023 in Astana, Kazakhstan.
Three training events brought together 96 representatives of the Financial Monitoring Agency of the Republic of Kazakhstan (the Financial Intelligence Unit and the Economic Investigation Service), Astana International Financial Centre (the Astana Financial Services Authority), the National Bank, the Agency for Protection and Development of Competition, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Culture and Sports, as well as financial monitoring entities, including financial institutions, non-banking financial institutions and designated non-financial businesses and professions (DNFBPs). In addition, more than 500 participants from the industry of various cities of Kazakhstan actively participated in the discussions.
The participants learned the requirements of customer due diligence measures in collecting information on beneficial ownership; practices for identifying beneficial ownership; the mechanisms of maintaining registers; the typologies of misuse of legal persons, and recent developments adopted in other jurisdictions. The financial monitoring entities also studied the liability of sending a qualitative suspicious transaction report relating to beneficial ownership to the Financial Intelligence Unit. The activities also contributed to strengthening the supervision skills of the national regulatory authorities by providing the good practices in Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Financing of Terrorism supervision.
This activity was organised by the Action on “Promoting Transparency and Action against Economic Crime” of the Central Asia Rule of Law Programme 2020-2023, a joint initiative co-funded by the European Union and the Council of Europe and implemented by the Council of Europe.