The United States provides the First Workshop on Financial Investigations and Disruption of Financial Crime in the Marshall Islands

For Immediate Release                                                                                                         

Date: April 17, 2023

Majuro – Today marked the launch of the first-ever workshop on Intelligence-Led Financial Investigation (ILFI) and Disruption of Corruption. The three-day training is a collaboration between the United States Government and the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI). Participants will receive training aimed at lessening targeting transnational crime and associated money laundering. Participants in this training consist of the Republic of the Marshall Islands’ Ministry of Finance, Banking, and Postal Service and the Ministry of Justice, Labor, and Immigration. In addition, representatives from the financial intelligence units of Palau, Kiribati, and the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) are joining the event.

During today’s launch of the training, Chargé d’Affaires Jeremiah Knight, said, “In line with the key pillars of the US Pacific Partnership Strategy launched in September 2022, one of the key strategies is to bolster good governance capacity across the Pacific through strengthening support for transparency, anti-corruption, civil society, media, and human-rights programs”. He went on to state, “The ILFI program aims to develop the capacity to identify and disrupt the most harmful facilitators and offenders of financial crime and to encourage better use of a wide range of alternative criminal and civil disruption methods.”

The American Bar Association (ABA) Rule of Law Initiative (ROLI) organized this training under the Intel-Led Money Laundering Investigations program (ILFI) that ABA ROLI implements in several countries. ABA ROLI offers international expertise, capacity building, and networking to address problems of global money laundering and illicit financial flows in the Pacific region. ABA organized three workshops successfully last year, and this pilot course for the Pacific will be followed by two other ILFI workshops in Southeast Asia this summer.

For more information about the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiatives and the ABA Impact Report 2022, visit https://www.americanbar.org/advocacy/rule_of_law.