The anti-money laundering efforts, along with the fight against terrorism in Tanzania took a hit during the month.  During a meeting of the finance ministers, the government split when trying to come to an agreement about whether or not to allow a report to be approved, a report that confirmed the state of affairs for the country in regards to the corruption, which is not good.  They prevented the approval of that report, which disregarded the efforts of the fight.

The reports had been approved previously by the regional officials, who were organizing the fight against terrorism and they were expected to be approved on the Ministerial level, while South Africa submitted the reports, the region of Tanzania did not. The Financial Action Task force from France, was part of the inter-governmental organization over-seeing the council meeting and the postponement of the submission by Tanzania was a surprise stated the president, Paul Vlaanderen.

This has not only an effect on the fight against the corruption but may have serious implications for the banks, as now this too looks suspicious, and foreign banks may not want to continue having dealings with the unknown, the unknown being just how bad are the money laundering cases in Tanzania.   One of the reasons for this is that when a high percentage of a banks transactions involve cash, those transactions become hard to keep track off.

Tanzania is a developing country, and the norm in those countries is to deal more with cash than in countries that are developed.  As the global recession ()continues the people begin to lose confidence in banks and the financial institutions, this too causes more and more people to just deal with cash.  It is a cycle that is becoming hard to break.  It was shown in the report from Tanzania that on the island of Zanzibar the laws regarding anti-money laundering have not yet been implemented, and some of the officials are just turning a blind eye to the situation.  The finance minister of Tanzania stated that it was not what was in the report that caused them to postpone the approval, but that the report itself needed to be worked on, and rescheduled the meeting to so for this coming December.

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