UN Office on Drugs and Crime continues enhancing Turkmen national counterparts’ capacity in countering terrorist financing

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Regional Office for Central Asia and UNODC Global Programme Against Money Laundering (GPML) in co-operation with the Ministry of Finance and Economy of Turkmenistan and OSCE conducted the 2nd stage of the training programme on Countering the financing of terrorism (CFT) in Turkmenistan.

The three-day online training course aimed at strengthening the capacity of Turkmenistan in operative analysis to counter terrorism financing was held on June 17-19, 2020. Considering the situation related to COVID-19 crisis, as well as, to comply with the requirements of confinement, the 2nd stage was held online. The practitioners from the Financial Monitoring Service under the Ministry of Finance and Economy, the Ministries of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of National Security, and the General Prosecutor’s Office of Turkmenistan obtained knowledge and skills in conducting operative analysis in course of financial investigations.

“Turkmen’s experts on countering the financing of terrorism will focus on learning new techniques to investigate and analysis of financial flows. This programme is also about developing as one team – each of the agencies here have unique capabilities, but we have seen elsewhere that only together we can work effectively.” – highlighted Mr. Aliaksandr Vadziany, UNODC Adviser on anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism.

The second training course emphasized the key role of operative analysis in conducting financial investigations and covered such topics as data processing cycle, international classification of intelligence, process of analysis and specific features of analysis of financial data and included several simulations, which allowed the participants to exercise obtained knowledge and skills.

The CFT training programme aims at strengthening Turkmenistan’s compliance with international standards, UN Security Council Resolutions, in particular Resolution 2462 (2019), the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF)’s standards, and UN norms in countering terrorism financing.

The training course is being implemented with the financial support of the Russian Federation, and technical support of the International Training and Methodological Center for Financial Monitoring of the Russian Federation.