JULIA Abad on Monday confirmed her resignation as Anti-Money Laundering Council (AMLC) executive director effective today, saying the agency needed a new leadership to be more effective.
“[T]he recent developments that confronted the AMLC and its Secretariat gave me the occasion to realize that, though already resilient on its own, the AMLC Secretariat will be accorded with renewed strength through a transformed strategy. To be more effective, the direction that the AMLC Secretariat will prospectively take would have to come from a new leadership,” she said in a statement.
President Rodrigo Duterte had called for the resignation of AMLC executives, claiming they were playing politics and hampering the government’s anti-corruption efforts. Duterte claimed AMLC officials were “hard to deal with” and were protecting money launderers and drug suspects, including Sen. Leila de Lima.
The AMLC was also rocked last year following the discovery of the $81-million Bangladesh Bank heist.
“I am deeply honored and humbled to have worked for more than ten years in the AMLC Secretariat with capable men and women of unsullied integrity who decided to dedicate themselves to be vanguards in this war against money laundering and terrorism financing,” Abad said.