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The Sri Lankan Bankruptcy Battle

International Monetary Fund (“IMF”) was founded in the aftermath of World War-II at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 to establish a post-war financial order that would facilitate economic cooperation.[1] The IMF has the mandate of providing financial support mechanisms such as bailouts to member countries that are experiencing actual or potential macroeconomic problems. A balance of payments crisis is a huge macroeconomic imbalance. It is also called currency crisis. It occurs when a nation is unable to pay for essential imports or service its external debt payments. Since 2010, world financial markets have expressed recurrent concerns about risks to debt sustainability. This was fuelled by the COVID-19 pandemic wherein most stressed economies got pushed into a pandemic induced financial crisis, making IMF bailouts the go to short-term ‘solution’ for failing balance of payments.Continue Reading International Monetary Fund Bailouts: The Sri Lankan Bankruptcy Battle

Into the Web - AML Risks of Virtual Assets - Part 1

Part I of this article explores the current Indian regulatory and legal framework governing the virtual asset industry and recommendations for AML/CFT compliance in respect of virtual asssets.

Indian legal framework

The virtual asset industry has had a somewhat difficult time in India, with the RBI banning any regulated entities from providing services to any individual or business, dealing in digital currencies, given the risks involved in such transactions. The term ‘services’ included maintaining accounts, registering, trading, settling, clearing, giving loans against virtual tokens, accepting them as collateral, opening accounts of exchanges, dealing with them and transferring or receipt of money in accounts relating to purchase/ sale of VCs or facilitating the same thereof.
Continue Reading Into the Web: AML Risks of Virtual Assets? – Part II

Into the Web - AML Risks of Virtual Assets - Part 1

Nothing is permanent but change.

                                                                            – Heraclitus

Part I of this article explores the anti-money laundering risks associated with virtual assets and provides a glance at the current international regulatory and legal framework governing the virtual asset industry.

Technology has evolved to a point where we have to redefine what we assume would be easy to legally categorise. The evolution of virtual assets is such an example — with a dynamic categorisation of virtual assets, as also securities such as NFTs (a Non-Fungible Token, which is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable. Examples include: photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files) and DeFi (Decentralised Finance is a blockchain-based form of finance that does not rely on central financial intermediaries such as brokerages, exchanges, or banks to offer traditional financial instruments, and instead utilises smart contracts on blockchains, example: Ethereum).
Continue Reading Into the Web: AML Risks of Virtual Assets? – Part I