Iranian Deposit Did Not Fulfilled the Formal Requisites

Majid Salehi

The Iranian ambassador, Majid Salehi, deposited 1,8 million dollars in cash, in bills tied with strings of the Treasury Department of the United States. This action generates doubts regarding the logistics used to do this, since the volume of bills suggest that to transport them, at least two briefcases must been used. The Money Laundering Act and Customs that rules in Ecuador, forces all Ecuadorians to declare the legitimacy of the deposits to surpass the 10 thousand dollars, this fundamental requisite was overlooked by the authorities of the State Bank COFIEC, hence there are doubts about the origin of the money.

According to the current laws people that fail to comply with those requisites must pay a fine of 30% according to the deposited value (in this case it would be $540,000). If there is any suspicion of felony a money laundry investigation is made, said the police investigator in charge of the case on behalf of the Financial Unity Analysis (UAF for its Spanish acronym).

Analyst Mauricio Pozo pointed out that any financial institution must take in consideration that in any financial institution there is a procedure called “Know your client” in which the depositor gives the reason of the funds origin. In case that this procedure is not made, the legitimacy of the resources is compromised. AV