Rosemary ONUOHA

To curb the menace of terrorism and financial crimes, the National Insurance Commission, NAICOM, is joining forces with other players in the financial sector to block all avenues through which funding can get to terrorists. In this brief interview, Deputy Commissioner, Finance & Accounts of NAICOM, Mr. George Onekhena spoke on steps the Commission is taking towards this direction.

Funding terrorism through insurance
One of the issues in terrorism is funding and without funding it is not possible for terrorists to do some of the things they are doing. They are not doing it spiritually, they have to deploy money and resources to embark on some of the things they are doing. That is why we took players through the Anti- Money Laundering and Combating Financial Crimes programmes, so that no one brings in money or gains access to funds that are not accounted for.

We have report of transaction to transaction on daily basis. When these reports come, we look at it and it also goes to the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit (NFIU) for verification against funding for terrorism. The effort in this regard is integrated, we have our role and the NFIU has its own role.

Impact of terrorism on the economy
There are so many aspects of the impact of terrorism on the economy. The first part is the individuals that are affected. I really think that when you have a life insurance cover, death by any means other than suicide, entitles you to claims payment. There is also accident cover for individuals which also entitle them to claims payment.

For terrorism specifically, in a typical insurance contract, there is the normal cover and the extensions. Insurance is supposed to reflect the risk in the society, so, since terrorism as a risk is coming into the society now, I think that practitioners should begin to look at it and ask themselves, what extensions do we provide? Or at what price do we provide the extensions?

Reason for anti-money laundering framework
It is part of change management process, which is in line with international best practice. We are becoming part of the international community, and so many of the things that we were not used to doing historically, we will be doing going forward. Now, we are talking about International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS); we are talking about risk management; we are also talking about anti-money laundering and combating of financial crimes.

All these things are coming at us the regulator and insurance operators at this time. In the time when they were in school, in the time when they were taking professional exams, these items were not there, so that is why we need to make some persistent effort to ensure that they have the understanding. Because it is when you understand that you can effectively comply.

Money Laundering and compliance issues
It is not a problem for the insurance industry. The reason we arranged the anti-money laundering programme is because, we have produced a manual and a new regulation was issued. So the effort is to ensure that operators understand what the requirements are.

Effect of Police Pension scheme fraud on insurance
The thing really is that, in insurance industry we have our control programmes, and what are the key funds we have? We have policyholders’ funds, we have shareholders funds and it is a requirement of the law that you must have policyholders fund either in banks or in the capital market or in property. We check these things frequently.

Any company that does not have those funds, we take steps to ensure that they have the minimum requirement. We also check their solvency level. For now, we have not had any incident of such cases of fraud.