procedures, but will deepen further on assessing the support the management structures of the banks, give to the real implementation of the aml internal policies. the position of a central bank is, according to the law, very comfortable, but playing the proactive role of a responsible central bank, showing the concrete implementation of this responsibility, we will intensify our efforts together with the other actors of interest to enable a better implementation of the law on money laundering prevention. allow me to close this speech, thanking the co - organisers of this workshop, the tirana office of fsvc and the albanian association of banks. i thank in particular all the specialists of the commercial banks and of the non - bank financial institutions that took part in this seminar, for their valuable contribution on preventing money laundering in their institutions. i thank particularly the foreign experts, mr. farrell and mr. burnside, that accepted to share with us their valuable experience. i wish this workshop has also been for them an interesting event. thank you.

size in normal times, can be easily exceeded in instances of unusual events that are linked with scandals on ml. firstly, i want to say that we must be very careful not to allow such difficulties to distract our focus from the heart of the issue, that of being ensured at any time that our banks are clean and that they do not represent a place where dirty money and its creators or benefitors can not enter. if we do not act like this, the negative consequences can be unimaginable. we put in danger the reputation of single financial institutions and of the entire financial system ; unwillingly, we have become instrumental of crime in reaching their goal of using the money generated from illegal activities ; we have placed the reputation of our sound clients in a very difficult position ; we have lost confidence in front of the honest market players and have darkened our positive image in front of our international partners and partners of our clients ; we are going to face in the future a higher cost on doing the bank business, represented not only from the loss of clients ( which can prove to be fatal ), but also from difficulties in expanding our activities ; we can also expect to be subjects of penal actions triggered by the regulatory framework. the damage is multifold and exceeds any quantitative advantage in the volume of business we may have had from “ outright ” acceptance of any business offer. in the end, through rigorous application of aml requirements, we have protected our institution from a potentially very large damage. this is the key element of our duty, the feature of a good banker. by being active in aml, we are simply doing our job. any negligence on this means we are not up to the requirements of our job. we need to emphasize that the key element in the process, is the strong commitment to understand and implement it. it is very important for such commitment to come from the highest management structures of the bank. if such commitment is missing, this will be immediately shown at the structures of the bank that are directly involved in the aml process, whose functioning will be negligible and full of formalism. within the institution, this commitment should be shown : in the preparation and approval of the internal procedures on aml ( including those of knowing the client ), in setting up the proper entities and appointing the responsible persons ( on monitoring the aml implementation process ) with the proper professional and hierarchical qualities, in rightly defining their rights and responsibilities, in giving them moral and material support, in providing