Published February 10, 2011

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2011/02/10/money-laundering-reaches-bn-annually-mexico/#

Mexico City –  Money laundering has grown in the past 15 years in Mexico, reaching $10 billion in 2010, Sen. Carlos Navarrete said, citing Attorney General's Office figures.

"The laundering of money is a problem that worsens from day to day because billions of dollars have been laundered and injected into the country's formal economy over several years," the senator said during the inauguration Wednesday of the "Seminario Internacional sobre Corrupcion y Lavado de Dinero" (International Seminar on Corruption and Money Laundering).

"This problem has disrupted banking institutions, investment firms and businessmen, and I believe it is time for a good law that will allow us to strike a blow at the finances of organized crime groups," Navarrete, who serves as coordinator of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, caucus in the Senate, said.

Lawmakers, other public officials and Mexican and foreign academics are taking part in the seminar, analyzing the legislation submitted to Congress by the Calderon administration last year to fight money laundering.

Any new law "should improve access to information between the authorities and other countries," the Federal Police's coordinator of operations targeting ill-gotten gains, Jesus Alberto Fernandez Wilburn, said.

Mexico is currently conducting 15 open investigations with the United States, but "until we have adequate mechanisms, there will be no exchange of information between one authority and another," Fernandez said.

Authorities must "have more access" via court orders to Mexicans' bank accounts, the head of the Finance Secretariat's Financial Intelligence Unit, Jose Alberto Balbuena, said.

Several Spanish experts invited to the conference also weighed in on efforts to fight money laundering.

"The economies of important countries have allowed themselves to be dazzled by the short-term advantages of asset laundering and have installed sinister windows to collect the foreign exchange without asking where it comes from," University of Salamanca professor Eduardo Fabian Caparros said.

Javier Fernandez, a professor at Spain's University of Oviedo, said when a criminal gains access to all the resources he needs to operate, he also has everything necessary to avoid being identified.

"The ones at the top of the economic and criminal summit are the ones who are dedicated to laundering money. That is why it is necessary to review the effects and earnings of this illicit" business, Fernandez said.

Judges in Spain look at a number of factors, including unusual transactions in the course of doing day-to-day business and prior participation by a suspect in criminal activities, when investigating a case in which there is no evidence of direct involvement in money laundering, Fernandez said.

Jorge Malem, a professor at Barcelona's Universidad Pompeu Fabra, focused on corruption, noting that the problem was not new.

"This has always been a historical constant, including in a well-established democratic system," Malem said.