Turkey has mirrored the requirements of EU Money Laundering Directive in its legislation (Law on Prevention of Laundering Proceeds of Crime No. 5549, as amended).
A FATF member, it observes most of the FATF-49 standards.
Turkey has established a financial intelligence unit (FIU), the Mali Suçlari Arastirma Kurulu (MASAK) or Financial Crimes Investigation Board, which is a member of The Egmont Group. Financial professions in the broadest sense are required to report suspicious operations to the MASAK.
Account opening procedures, insurance contracts, safe deposit services and financial leasing require formal identification of the account holder, except when the customer is a ‘state economic enterprise or quasi-public institution’.
All credit and financial institutions have to identify clients for transactions exceeding TRY 20,000 or the equivalent amount in foreign currency.
Headlines of VakifBank’s Main Principles for Prevention of Money Laundering
- Know Your Customer Policy
- Compliance with all applicable laws and cooperation with external and internal authorities, comptrollers, auditors and inspectors.
- Internal procedures and intensive training, monitoring and reporting activities.
VakifBank’s Main Principles for Prevention of Money Laundering
- We request identification regardless of monetary limit before executing transactions related to insurance, financial leasing, deposit box services and opening all kinds of accounts. (deposit, current, repo etc…)
- We keep all identification documents for 10 years from the transaction date.
- Our Bank has a Compliance Department to develop programmes and strategies against Money Laundering and terrorist financing.
- Our Computer system works on a real time on line basis and has automated controls in order to avoid double client entries.
- The Operations Department makes daily controls to check whether identification requirements are fulfilled for every new account opened.
- Names of suspicious persons and organizations supplied by Government Authorities are listed at our Intranet in order to warn our employees prior to initiating transactions.
- Changes in the list of Non Cooperative Countries (NCC) published by FATF are announced to our employees promptly through Intranet.
- Our employees are informed on any changes in anti money- laundering laws and regulations through our bank’s intranet.
- We report all kinds of transactions that fall into the category of, "suspicious transactions” mentioned in the Law 5549, to MASAK (Turkish Financial Intelligence Unit)
- We do not maintain anonymous accounts.
- We do not conduct business with shell banks, having no physical presence in any country.
- Our anti money laundering control policy does not make reference to the person's regardless religion, race, language and politically involvement.