Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1421642
4 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 24 OCTOBER 2021 NEWS POSTS FOR LAWYER WITH THE OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL (Jobsplus Vacancy No. 369626, Permit Nos. 273/2021) The Office of the Attorney General Agency is inviting applications for Lawyers to carry out prosecution and related duties. The selected candidates will be employed on a full-time indefinite term basis, subject to a probation period, and will be required to work for a minimum of forty hours per week. Applicants must be in possession of a warrant to practice the profession of Advocate and, must also have at least one year experience in the practice of the profession covered by a warrant. POSTS FOR TRAINEE LAWYER WITH THE OFFICE OF THE ATTORNEY GENERAL (Jobsplus Vacancy No. 376134, Permit Nos. 689/2021) The Office of the Attorney General Agency is inviting applications for Trainee Lawyers to carry out prosecution and related duties. The selected candidates will be employed on a full-time indefinite term basis, subject to a probation period, and will be required to work for a minimum of forty hours per week. Applicants must be in possession of a warrant to practice the profession of Advocate. ________________________________________________________________________ Applications must quote relevant Jobsplus Vacancy Reference, include a detailed CV, and should be addressed to: The Administration Office of the Attorney General, No. 53, Admiralty House, South Street, Valletta VLT 1101 or emailed to ag@attorneygeneral.mt and should be submitted by not later than Friday 5th November 2021 at 13:00 hrs. Malta greylisting means week's delay for BOV-to-HSBC transfer MATTHEW VELLA MAJOR players in the Maltese financial services industry have had to file declarations with their banks that they are not servicing any clients based in blacklisted jurisdictions: one of the direct effects of Malta's greylisting by the Financial Action Task Force. Now a major theme of the Na- tionalist Party's criticism of the Abela administration, Malta's greylisting by the FATF is af- fecting the normal conduct of business on large transactions of cash. In one clear example shown to MaltaToday, a correspondent bank handling a SWIFT trans- action from Bank of Valletta to HSBC Malta held up individual transactions worth hundreds of thousands of euros, for at least seven days. The money was a refund from an oversubscribed bond issue, which required a remittance from BOV to HSBC Malta. Neither bank was aware of why the hold-up had taken place, with the payment having been cleared by the SWIFT centre and the bank's payment screen- ing and payment investigations unit. It was only after further inquir- ies were made by the initiating bank a week after, that it had resulted that the correspondent bank had sent a list of questions in connection with the trans- action. The client was asked to confirm that none of its cli- ents, for whom the refund was expected to be sent to, had any relation to blacklisted jurisdic- tions Iran, Syria, Crimea, North Korea, or Cuba. One of the financial players with knowledge of the delayed transactions said the develop- ment was worrying: "This is a tangible sign of the FATF grey- listing effect. What was sup- posed to be a same-day remit- tance from one Maltese bank to the other, took seven days. It generated a lot of to-and-fro from one bank to the other, with the client having to enquire whether the amount had been blocked or not. Unlike the FATF greylisting, which signalled to companies and countries that they should exercise increased caution when trading in Malta, the country's re-categorisation by the UK gov- ernment as a high-risk jurisdic- tion now forces practitioners to adhere by a number of legally binding procedures. This sets into motion an en- hanced due diligence which in- cludes additional information on the customer, the business relationship, the source of funds, reasons for the transaction, and the enhanced monitoring of the business relationship by increas- ing the number and timings of controls applied. Undoubtedly, this could lead to an increased cost in cross-bor- der transactions with the UK, as Maltese banks would need to ensure a higher level of scrutiny on outgoing payments. Increased requests for informa- tion on the nature of payments from Maltese banks, as well as restrictions by UK correspond- ent banks on downstream bank- ing relationships with Maltese banks, are some of the effects of the FATF greylisting for Malta. FATF update FATF President Marcus Pleyer said Malta has made "good pro- gress" to get off the greylist. "Malta has made good progress across its action plan including by imposing an increasing num- ber of penalties, with dissuasive average fines for the filing of in- correct beneficial ownership in- formation," he said. Addressing a press conference, Pleyer said since being greylist- ed, the country has done well to disseminate information to the Police Force related to tax crimes. "It [Malta] has also dissemi- nated additional financial in- telligence to the Malta Police concerning money laundering linked to tax crimes leading to a greater number of tax based money laundering investigations than in the years past," the FATF president said. Government has received crit- icism from the Opposition for failing to address Malta's greylis- ting in a meaningful way in the budget presented last week. Opposition finance spokesper- son Mario de Marco accused the government of picking on the small fish to try and impress in- ternational assessors. Pleyer also said more work re- mains to be done by Malta. "However, there is more work that remains - as none of Malta's action plans have been largely addressed in the short time since the listing in June. So the FATF has seen good initial steps for Malta and encourages it to con- tinue its improvements and ad- dress all the items in the action plan," he said. Malta was placed on the grey- list in June, after it failed to gar- ner the necessary support from FATF members, despite its ad- herence to a Moneyval assess- ment in which it achieved a high compliance rate on various rec- ommendations. Malta bank-to-bank transaction held up for one week until correspondent bank was satisfied that underlying clients are not from Iran or North Korea