Capital Judicial Council.. A study day on criminalizing acts of money laundering and terrorist financing – Al-Hiwar Al-Jazaeryia

Today, Sunday, the investigating judge at the Rouiba Court, Yassine Shena, touched on the new provisions of the crime of money laundering and terrorist financing contained in Law 23-01 related to the prevention and combating of money laundering and terrorist financing, indicating that the Algerian legislator introduced new amendments for the purpose of preventing this crime. and combat it in the most effective way.
This came on a study day organized by the Capital Judicial Council, with the participation of specialists including judges, lawyers and judicial police officers, as well as university professors.
With regard to financial transactions, Judge Sheena stressed the need to “commit to vigilance through careful monitoring of the completed operations, updating information related to them, and keeping all documents and records for a period of no less than 5 years.”
In the same context, the investigative judge at the National Economic and Financial Criminal Pole, Abd al-Moamen Moissi, indicated that the new procedure represented in the financial investigation parallel to the criminal investigation “allowed the determination of the movement of the accused’s transit, the funds used in the crime, the search for the accused’s real estate, notifications of suspicion, and bank and postal accounts.” He added that this made it possible to “seize, freeze and confiscate funds at the national level, with the adoption of international judicial cooperation to follow up the investigation by sending an international judicial rogatory.”
For his part, the investigative judge at the El-Harrach Court, Mohamed El-Seddik Riach, dealt with international agreements related to money laundering and terrorist financing, similar to the 1988 Vienna Convention on Drug Control, which constituted – according to him – “an important step through which the international community’s conviction of the need to combat money-laundering” was embodied. Pointing out that each country “must consider the financing of terrorism a criminal offense according to its internal laws and impose appropriate penalties that take into account its seriousness, in addition to taking the necessary measures to detect, freeze or seize any funds used for the purpose of financing terrorism, while obligating financial institutions to verify the identities of their customers and prohibiting the opening of accounts.” to unidentified persons.

At the end of this study day, the participants recommended the need to rely on modern digitization methods in the field of combating this type of crime, while training all workers in this field.

The Assistant Attorney General of the Algerian Judicial Council, Sami Lehoum, explained that this study day falls within the framework of “the continuous training of judges and other actors with the aim of shedding light on a crime dangerous to security, the economy and society, and raising awareness of the importance of combating it.”