Book

Description

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.