Malta: Anti-money and certificate of compliance duties?

In essence, this implies that the issuer has to:

• Have adequate procedures and systems to detect and combat money laundering and financing of international terrorism;

• Appoint a qualified Money Laundering Reporting Officer;

• Perform customer due diligence;

• Monitor transactions;

• Conduct periodical risk assessment on the clients;

• Submit suspicious transaction reports to the relevant authorities. The issuer shall be required to submit on an annual basis a certificate of compliance to the MFSA which will be drawn up by the Issuer, reviewed by the VFA Agent and signed by all the members of the Issuer’s Board of Administration. The certificate will confirm that the issuer is compliant with all the relevant obligations laid down by law and include the following confirmations by the:

• MLRO that all AML regulations are complied with;

• Systems Auditor that all Innovative Technoolgy Arrangemnets conform to the standards set by the Malta Digitial Innovation Authority;

• VFA Agent that the Issuer is a fit and proper person;

• Board of Administrators that there have been no breaches of the laws. In addition, the Issuer shall on an annual basis also engage an independent auditor to draw up a report to include:

• Confirmation that the AML systems of the Issuer are in place;

• A review of the operations of the Issuer from an AML perspective.

INVESTOR PROTECTION

The law requires the Issuer to provide a detailed description of the past and future milestones and project financing within the whitepaper. It will be the duty of the VFA Agent to ensure that the Issuer has provided investors with a roadmap setting out the milestones for the ICO and to check whether the Issuer is meeting the said milestones. In the event that these milestones are not being met, the VFA Agent would be required to inform the MFSA accordingly. In order to limit exposures in case of failure, the Issuer shall ensure that an investor does not invest more than €5,000 in its ICO over a period of 12 months. This limitation is only applicable to retail investors as defined by MiFID.

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