The plenary sitting of the Council of Europe (CE) expert group on Moneyval money laundering will be held from 31 January to 3 February 2006 in Strasbourg, a board member of the National Bank of Azerbaijan (NBA), the head of the inter-departmental working group on money laundering fighting Rufat Aslanli told Trend. The head of the group on the money laundering fighting at the NBA department on supervision of the lending institutions activities Aliyar Mammadyarov and the Justice Ministry official, a member of the inter-departmental working group Fahriyar Djabbarov will take part in the sitting from Azerbaijan.
Under the program, the countries will inform of the work done in fighting against money laundering and funding terrorism. According to Aslanli, the Azerbaijan delegation is also going to report on the progress in this respect in the country. Moneyval sittings take place three times a year and each country is given time to report on the work done.
The inter-governmental group is currently getting ready for the second round of the assessment to take place in 2006, as for this purpose Mo¬ney¬val has an assessment program, but it is unknown, whether Azerbaijan be in this list. Meanwhile, the government tries to fulfill all needed measures, particularly, on ratification of the draft law, which is under consideration at the presidential office.
The first round of Azerbaijan assessment was held in May 2003, on which basis Azerbaijan was placed among the category, mostly conforming to the FATF countries standards. From that moment the standards were supplemented by the new standard on funding terrorism counteracting. At the Mo¬ney¬val regular plenary sitting of 17 January 2005 in Strasbourg the interim report of Azerbaijan in this field was heard. The CE expert group assessed positively the report on fulfillment of the Mo¬ney¬val recommendations for the period after December 2003 to the start of the previous year.