ABSTRACT
Prior to the terrorist attacks in the United States of America (USA) on 11 September 2001 (9/11), the international community’s attitude towards financial crime focused on the prevention of money laundering, the illegal drugs trade and fraud. One of the consequences of 9/11, however, was a fundamental change in attitudes towards implementing counter-terrorist financing (CTF) laws. Terrorist financing has been defined widely and we include some of those definitions here. For example, the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist financing defines it as including ‘assets of every kind, whether tangible or intangible, movable or immovable, however acquired, and legal documents or instruments in any form’. 1 It has also been defined as the ‘raising, moving, storing and using of financial resources for the purposes of terrorism’, 2 and by the World Bank as providing ‘the financial support, in any form, of terrorism or of those who encourage, plan, or engage in it’. 3 Furthermore, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has stated that terrorist financing ‘involves the solicitation, collection or provision of funds with the intention that they may be used to support terrorist acts or organizations’. 4 Terrorist financing has also been referred to as ‘reverse money laundering’, which is a practice
of terrorism. As detailed in the previous chapter, money laundering involves the conversion of ‘dirty’ or ‘illegal’ money into clean money via its laundering through three recognised phases.
