EU removes UAE from ‘high-risk' money-laundering list, adds Monaco
BRUSSELS: The EU on Tuesday announced the removal of the United Arab Emirates from its money-laundering 'high-risk' list but added Monaco alongside nine other jurisdictions.
The European Commission said it added Algeria, Angola, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Laos, Lebanon, Namibia, Nepal and Venezuela, along with Monaco, to the list of countries subject to extra monitoring of their money laundering controls.
In addition to the UAE, it removed Barbados, Gibraltar, Jamaica, Panama, the Philippines, Senegal and Uganda.
The moves come after a money-laundering watchdog said in February it had removed the Philippines from its list of countries that face increased monitoring, while adding Laos and Nepal.
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a Paris-based organisation that reviews efforts by more than 200 countries and jurisdictions to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing, compiles a 'grey list' of nations that are subject to increased monitoring of financial transactions.
Monaco has been included on the FATF list since mid-2024, along with EU member states Bulgaria and Croatia.
'The commission has now presented an update to the EU list which reiterates our strong commitment to aligning with international standards, particularly those set by the FATF,' the EU's commissioner for financial services, Maria Luis Albuquerque, said.
The EU list will now be scrutinised by the European Parliament and member states and will enter into force within one month if there are no objections, the commission said.
In a statement, Monaco's government said it had 'taken note of this expected update, which would lead to Monaco being placed on the EU's list, unless the European Parliament or the Council of the EU decides otherwise'.
It also stressed its commitment to take the necessary steps to be removed from the FATF's grey list 'in the short term'.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Star
31 minutes ago
- The Star
While AI gains ground, traditional search engines still have a place, say experts
Has artificial intelligence (AI) changed the way we interact with the digital world, and more importantly, have old systems and principles become irrelevant with the advent of AI? Those questions took centre stage during the Malaysia Digital Association (MDA) D-Conference 2025 on June 12, which brought speakers from across various industries to discuss the intersection between technology and creativity. A panel discussion titled "AI vs Search: Reinventing Discovery Or Breaking The System" explored the impact of AI on how people find information online. US-based web advertising company Taboola's regional director for India and South-East Asia, Aaron Rigby, highlights fragmentation across generational lines regarding the use of "search". He observes that older users are sticking to traditional search engines and research behaviour, while those from younger generations are relying on platforms like TikTok when searching for information. Rigby says that despite advances in AI chatbots, search engines are not going anywhere. — RAJA FAISAL HISHAN/The Star With the rise of chatbots and AI integration in search results, Rigby sees them taking a complementary role to one another. "Firstly, is AI going to replace search? No, I don't think so. It's pretty much reimagining search. "Google still receives 370 times the number of queries that AI chatbots are receiving. "Of all the people using ChatGPT, 99% of them, which is another way of saying 100% with a rounding error, are still using Google search, so it's not going anywhere," he says. The shift, Rigby says, will be in how users interact with both chatbots and search engines. He believes that both will have their respective roles to play in developing distinct workflows and splitting up the search process. For example, when aiming for more thorough and complex questions that require context, users are opting for AI assistance to get the answers they are looking for, he says. Meanwhile, when it comes to simpler, quickfire answers, they go straight to Google, he adds. "I think as we move forward, it's not going to replace, it's going to converge and evolve in an interesting way," he says. Vinda Malaysia's head of media, business intelligence and data Neeraj Mishra, on the other hand, touched on the trustworthiness of artificial intelligence when compared with traditional organic search results. Neeraj says that just a short two years ago, he would not have trusted the accuracy of results obtained from AI. Since then, however, he has seen rapid improvements and developments in the various AI platforms. Neeraj says that just a short two years ago, he would not have trusted the accuracy of results obtained from AI. — RAJA FAISAL HISHAN/The Star "I'll take a specific example: initially when ChatGPT launched, it was not connected to the Internet. "I'm not sure whether the results it gives me are correct or not, so I have to go to Google to confirm it. "But now, what happens is, within ChatGPT, it is connected to the Internet, and when you search, your search results also comes with the source. "Then what happens is, I can verify that it then and there whether the results are okay or not," he says, adding that he no longer needs to manually cross-check information from chatbots. He stresses that users now need to make sure to feed their chatbots well-worded and accurate prompts in order to receive high quality, trustworthy, and verified responses. "If you are using it and your prompts are good enough, the result you will get is reliable, trustworthy, and can be verified too. "But if your prompts are not accurate, the outcome will not be good," he says. Neeraj further stresses that it now falls on the user to ensure the quality of their prompts, rather than the blame falling on chatbots like ChatGPT. From an ethical perspective, Rigby says that the biggest challenge is in creative attribution. "AI is coming back with good results, and that is not being attributed to the publishers, and not being attributed to the creative industry. "So, if we continue down this way, we're essentially strip mining the very industry that AI is built for, right? "And then we'll have an AI which is fueled by nothing. So, from an ethical standpoint, it's so important we have to get this creative attribution right," he says. The human touch Another presentation given by Peter Kua, co-founder of AI consulting firm Data Science, titled "The AI takeover: Is UX as we know it over", discussed how humans are a necessary element in the design of user experience (UX). He emphasises that humans are the ones responsible for the inclusion of empathy and creativity in UX design. "The reality is that AI cannot replace human programmers. I mean, sure, AI is able to solve simple hackathon types of problems. It's also able to generate code snippets that you can cut and paste into your work. "But the real world is a lot more complex than that," he says, adding that AI fails miserably at addressing complex business problems and at figuring out current and legacy systems. The conference also included discussions on whether AI represents a boon or bane for creative works, the future of advertising in an AI era, and authenticity in a synthetic world, among others. Following the conference was the D-Awards 2025 ceremony, celebrating innovations in the creative space the past year.
The Star
31 minutes ago
- The Star
Oracle shares soar as AI cloud demand propels revenue forecast
FILE PHOTO: A screen displays the logo and trading information for Oracle Corporation on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., March 30, 2023. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo (Reuters) -Oracle shares surged nearly 8% in premarket trading on Thursday after the company raised its annual revenue forecast, driven by strong demand for its AI-related cloud services. The stock has risen nearly 6% so far this year as confidence in the software sector remained strong despite geopolitical tensions, even as analysts warn that U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs could undermine Big Tech's AI investments. Earlier this year, Oracle, whose cloud offerings help companies build their AI infrastructure, announced a joint venture called Stargate to deliver large-scale computing capabilities to OpenAI. "Oracle's once-stodgy image levels up to 'cloud-native mage,' and the competitive map now looks less like a classic three-player real time strategy and more like a battle-royale with everyone dropping in, looking for compute loot", said Michael Ashley Schulman, partner at Running Point Capital Advisors. Oracle expects total revenue to be at least $67 billion for fiscal 2026, CEO Safra Catz said on a post-earnings call. The Texas-based company's cloud services quarterly revenue rose 14% to $11.70 billion. Its overall revenue of $15.90 billion beat estimates of $15.59 least nine brokerages have raised their price target post-earnings. Oracle trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 25.86, compared to rivals Microsoft at 31.34 and Amazon at 31.80, according to data compiled by LSEG. Microsoft's stock has gained 12.16%, while Amazon's has decreased by 2.8% so far this year. "ORCL has entered an entirely new wave of enterprise popularity that it has not seen since the Internet era in the late 90s," analysts at Piper Sandler added. (Reporting by Rashika Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Tasim Zahid)
The Star
3 hours ago
- The Star
Nairobi startup's bid to be 'operating system for global South'
PARIS: Away from the heady rush to build ultra-capable, sci-fi style artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley, ambitious Nairobi-based startup Amini AI is betting on the technology addressing emerging countries' prosaic problems in the here and now. Chief executive Kate Kallot aims for Amini – still a relatively small firm with US$6mil (RM 25.34mil) in funding and 25 employees – to become 'the operating system for the Global South' in the coming years, creating the infrastructure foundation for others to build AI and data processing applications. 'There is a huge opportunity for emerging economies to focus on more applied AI innovation rather than fundamental research, which is what a lot of the US and Europe is doing,' Kallot told AFP at the Vivatech trade fair in Paris. On its website, the company highlights uses of its platform such as slashing crop insurance costs for farmers across Africa by monitoring conditions, or warning dairy producers in Morocco of water sources at risk from climate change. Such efforts are only a hint of what will become possible as more data is collected, organised and processed from across the emerging world, Kallot believes. 'Data in Africa, Latin America, South-East Asia, a lot of these emerging economies is still analogue and still scattered and still unstructured,' she noted. 'There is a lot of work that needs to go into building that data infrastructure that can help those countries move from analogue systems to digital and help them be ready to move to AI.' Kallot said Amini's small team was helping multiple countries develop such infrastructure, highlighting a recent memorandum of understanding with Ivory Coast and projects in Barbados, India, Nepal and Cambodia. Digital natives short on data Western tech firms have notoriously turned to cheap labour from emerging economies for tasks upstream of AI, such as arduous labelling of vast datasets used to 'train' AI models to recognise patterns. But in countries like Kenya or the Philippines, 'you have a population that is digitally native, extremely young... a lot of them have studied computer science' and speak English, Kallot said. 'The problem they have is that they lack the opportunity to practice their craft, because these regions are still seen as consumers of technology and are still seen as regions where innovation doesn't happen.' This is also reflected in how data is stored and processed. A 2024 report from American research firm Xalam Analytics found that just one percent of the world's data centre capacity is located in Africa – a region with almost 19% of the global population. What's more, only 2% of African data gets processed on the continent, Kallot said. 'We're still in a very data-scarce environment, and until this is fixed we won't be able to adopt a lot of the very fancy new systems that are being put in place by... the big tech companies,' she pointed out. Frugal and local Kallot sees little fallout for now in emerging economies from the US-China confrontation over the advanced chips powering the top-performing AI models. But nations are 'becoming some sort of battleground' for infrastructure investment by the superpowers' tech giants like Huawei and Microsoft. One area where Kallot would like to see change is emerging countries coming together to build shared infrastructure like data centres, rather than relying on processing abroad or waiting for foreign firms to build them locally. 'Before, building critical infrastructure for your country meant building a road, building a hospital – today it's actually building the data infrastructure,' she said. The choice to leave data to be processed abroad risks 'erasing... a lot of your knowledge system and your culture', she warned, as most artificial intelligence training has not included information from much of the emerging world. Looking forward, the limited infrastructure and computing power available outside top economies may actually foster frugal innovations that save energy and resources, Kallot said. Emerging economies boast 'brilliant developers that are doing things that are extremely environmentally friendly, that know how to work in a very contained and constrained environment... we just have to surface it and make sure we give them a platform', Kallot said. – AFP
