The Technical Commission of the Inter-State Group to Combat Money Laundering and the Financing of Terrorism in West Africa (GIABA) has started its extraordinary plenary since last Friday in Saly-Portudal.

Chaired by the Director General of GIABA, togolese Kimelabalou Aba, the official ceremony was attended by the heads of the Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) and the national correspondents of GIABA in its member States, among others. The objective is to assess the level of commitment and progress made by the countries that were assessed, namely Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ghana and Senegal in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

According to Kimelabalou Aba, the special session aims to catch up with activities that could not be organized in the past year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In his view, the aim was to assess the progress made in the implementation of the recommendations made in the mutual evaluation report in the light of the shortcomings that had been identified in their legal and institutional systems for combating money laundering and the terrorist financing (AML/CFT). These mutual evaluations were conducted against the 40 recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and the 11 immediate outcomes that are performance criteria.