Anti-Money Laundering Group to assess Angola

Representatives of the anti-money laundering group will initiate their mission meetings in Luanda today.

They will meet with various financial institutions from the public and private sectors—including the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) which monitors suspicious activities in Angola’s financial sector—as they attempt to implement recommendations from the Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF).

Angola, Africa’s second largest oil-producing country, ranks highly on many global corruption indices. Embezzlement of oil revenues and aid packages, including from the IMF, is common. In 2019, Angola recovered more than $5 billion stolen from the state, which included $3 billion stolen from the sovereign wealth fund. Angola has a significant amount of IMF debt, and as part of the debt agreement, it is tasked with combatting corruption. 

In the medium to short-term, corruption will likely limit or hinder Angola’s access to good credit rates and put it at risk of reentering FATF’s blacklist. Angola’s return to the blacklist would lead to economic sanctions. In the long-term, Angola will likely benefit from further regulating its financial sector in collaboration with the FIU, as the establishment of and collaboration with such a unit in 2011 resulted in Angola’s removal from the FATF’s blacklist by 2016.