Malta ranked 113 out of 125 countries analysed by the Basel Institute for Governance with the island being viewed as a low-risk jurisdiction for money laundering and terrorist financing.
The public edition of the Basel AML Index 2019 covers 125 countries by gathering data from publicly available sources such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Transparency International, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum.
Published since 2012, it provides risk scores based on data from a total of 15 publicly available sources such as those mentioned above.
The index measures countries based on the quality of their AML/CFT Framework; Bribery and Corruption; Financial Transparency and Standards; Public Transparency and Accountability and Legal and Political Risks.
Malta achieved a score of 3.94 out of 10, improving by 0.02 points when compared with last year. Countries which are given a score of five points or greater are considered to have a significant risk of exposure to money laundering.
Germany, France, Italy, the UK and Luxembourg were all outperformed by Malta.
The best performing countries were Estonia (score 2.68), Finland (3.17) and New Zealand (3.18). The worst performers were Mozambique (8.22), Laos (8.21) and Myanmar (7.93).