THE LICENSES of 745 Panama insurance brokers have been suspended for failing to comply with a law governing money laundering.

The Superintendency of Insurance and Reinsurance has suspended the licenses to sell and renew policies or collect commissions

for noncompliance with Law 23 of 2015 under which  insurers and insurance brokers are required to report transactions in cash and suspicious transactions. To do so, they must register with the Financial Analysis Unit (UAF online)).

Superintendent José Joaquín Riesen said that they were issued circulars warning of the obligation to register on the UAF online portal. On May 10 , the regulator granted a deadline up to July 31 to comply.

Since the law came into force two years ago, some 950 licenses have been suspended. The suspension is for a period of three months extendable another similar period. If at that time they have not complied), the licenses are canceled.

Riesen said that this is a drastic measure, but noted that "we must enforce the rules that we adopted as a country. "

Law 23  identifies the professions that must report suspicious transactions in financial activities. The insurance sector has the largest number of obligated people (2,400).

In February 2016, after approving the package of measures to prevent money laundering and the financing of terrorism, Panama left the gray list of the Action Group which it had entered 2014 due to the weakness of its legal framework to combat the crime.

This year, the Latin American arm of the Financial Action Task Force is making a new evaluation, which included a visit to Panama in May to gauge the effectiveness of the new rules.