A senior Treasury official on Wednesday defended the practice of publicly designating terrorist groups and freezing their funds, despite concern that the tactic could drive dirty cash flows underground. Robert Werner, the new head of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, said the United States had limited terrorists’ ability to move and store funds by freezing almost $150 million and blocking the financial transactions of roughly 400 people since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. “That’s always been the counterpoint, that if you drive people out of the formal system, they are harder to find. However, it also shows that our actions can disrupt and impede corrupt financial flows in a very, very significant way,” he told Reuters in an interview. “If people are deprived of the banks and non-banks, whether it’s broker-dealers, or money remitters, or insurance companies, it gets very difficult” for them to move money, Werner said on the sidelines of an anti-money laundering conference hosted by Alert Global Media. Full Story
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