‘Jordan 3rd regionally, 35th internationally in combating money laundering’

AMMAN — Jordan was ranked third among Arab countries and 35th internationally on the 2016 Basel Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Index.

The current Basel AML Index edition, published recently on the Basel Institute on Governance's website, covers 149 countries and assigns each country a score on a scale from 0 (low risk) to 10 (high risk).

The two Arab countries that came ahead of Jordan (4.88) are Tunisia (4.62) and Egypt (4.74), which internationally ranked 21st and 28th respectively.

The Basel Institute on Governance is an independent not-for-profit competence centre specialised in corruption prevention and public governance, corporate governance and compliance, anti-money laundering, criminal law enforcement and the recovery of stolen assets.

The top 10 countries of highest risk are Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uganda, Guinea-Bissau, Cambodia, Mozambique, Mali, Sudan and Myanmar.

Finland is the lowest-risk country, followed by Lithuania and Estonia.

The index "measures the risk of money laundering and terrorist financing of countries based on publicly available sources", according to the institute's website. 

Fourteen indicators that deal with anti-money laundering regulations, corruption, financial standards, political disclosure and rule of law are aggregated into one overall risk score. 

“As there are no quantitative data available, the Basel AML Index does not measure the actual existence of money laundering activity or amount of illicit financial money within a country, but is designed to indicate the risk level, i.e. the vulnerabilities of money laundering and terrorist financing within a country,” the institute said.