Bariyima Sylvester Kokpan

Nigerian Anti-Money Laundering Laws and the Innocent Bank Customers Bariyima Sylvester Kokpan

One of the primary responsibilities of government is to ensure the security of lives and property of its citizenry. To this end, governments criminalizes certain conducts that are seen to be obnoxious to the general public good. Such conducts includes the way and manner of creating wealth as well as interrogating the purpose for which monies earned legitimately are utilized. The Nigeria's Money Laundering (Prohibition) Act, (MLPA) 2011, (as amended) prohibit illicit earnings and criminally induced investments in and out of Nigeria as well as made it mandatory for banks and other financial sector regulators to without recourse to the customers report and disclose every so called 'suspicious transactions' to a third party regulator. However, the law also empowered the financial institutions to stop customer's transactions without court order, under the guise of suspicion. Besides, the law in defining the scope of conducts that constitute money laundering offences ended up criminalizing all unlawful conducts, whether or not it has anything to do with money or property or the financial institutions. This work argues that the unilateral disclosure of customers' transactions by financial institutions to a third party is arbitrary and violate bankers/customers rules on confidentiality. Laws that empowers pro-government agencies or institutions to stop a citizen's transaction suo motu without an order of court, simply because the fund involved in the particular transaction is "outside the normal range" is archaic, inexact and constitute a clog in the wheel of economic development. It is undeniably conceivable that so many factors such as change of marital or job status, long term savings, gift, sales of inherited property, monetary court judgment, family priority, life expectancy, health, education, fees payable for professional service, among others could engender unusual credit in favour of a bank customer. Furthermore, that the definitional scope of the Act, including the description of suspicious activities in section 6(1)(d) is not only lopsided but ambiguous. It is recommended that the Act be amended to focus on the original purpose for global anti- money laundering regimes as well as protect bank customer's right to confidentiality in financial transactions.