The International Compliance Association has opened an office in Malaysia in a bid to attract more compliance officers as members and clients.

The ICA was established in 2001 and has offices in the United Kingdom, the United States, Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong. It describes itself as an "awarding body for regulatory and financial crime compliance professionals globally." The trade body opened its new office in style, with a public panel discussion attended by compliance heads from the country's financial institutions.

The session, to which the ICA gave the uncharacteristically jumbled title of ‘Senior Management Regime “How will Bank Negara’s Responsibility Mapping project affect you and your firm?”, was highly charged and dominated by the policies of Malaysia's new government, which aims to make the country a more compliant place after the dark years that it spent under Najib Razak. The panellists included Datuk Seri Dr Nik Norzrul Thani, the chairman of Zico Law, Cynthia Gabriel, an executive director of the Centre to Combat Corruption and Cronyism (the C4 Centre), and Derick Choo, the head of training and education at the International Compliance Training Academy (ICTA). Kuok Yew Chen, a partner at Christopher & Lee Ong, moderated the session.

Participants in the discussion noted that the 1Malaysia Development Berhad scandal had shown that board members at financial firms, who are ultimately responsible for making those firms behave appropriately, should be held personally accountable for their firms' failures.

Andrew Glover is the ICA's director for the region and is based in Singapore. At the meeting he said: “The people of Malaysia spoke at the elections earlier this year with a very powerful and clear voice. I believe that the local ICA office will help us to further increase the demonstrable level of professionalism of compliance officers in Malaysia. This, coupled with [the] ICA’s work with key stakeholders in the region, will assist Malaysia in driving the financial community towards greater transparency and accountability and thus strengthen the value of the Malaysian financial market as a place to transact business.”

The ICA has long offered its internationally recognised qualifications in compliance and anti-money-laundering control to financial firms with the help of two of its allies, the Asian Institute of Chartered Bankers and the Malaysian Insurance Institute. Through them it trains compliance officers in standards both global and national.

In the meantime, the 1MDB saga has continued with a rash of new confiscations, this time in France. The Sarawak Report, Malaysia's most fearlessly investigative (and, until recently, persecuted) journal, says that months of secret investigations have culminated in swoops on properties valued collectively at perhaps more than €100 million that belong to Khadem al-Qubaisi, the convicted former chairman of the Abu Dhabi fund Aabar, a subsidiary of the International Petroleum Investment Company, which in turn is an investment fund wholly-owned by the government of Abu Dhabi. One country house, situated near the Cape of Saint-Tropez, originally cost €11 million; a luxury villa in Ramatuelle is worth an estimated €7.9 million; a flat in Avenue Montaigne in Paris cost €4.4 million; and another one near the Champ de Mars is worth at least €4.6 million.