Muluken
Yirga Dubale
Mr. Dubale has more than eleven years’ experience both in Ethiopia and Overseas as a money laundering/ terrorist financing prosecutor, Director of Legal and Internal Cooperation, enforcement regulator and a counter terrorist and terrorism financing consultant. He has been awarded a Master of Arts degree in Comparative Constitutional Law, Diploma in International Criminal Law and Investigation and holds a number of training certifications in the areas of AML/CFT and associated predicate offences including cybercrimes, environmental crimes, terrorism, terrorism financing trafficking in persons and fraud.
Mr. Dubale is currently working as a Senior Legal and FIU Expert at the Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money laundering Group (ESAAMLG) Secretariat. Mr. Dubale assisted the member countries of ESAAMLG in strengthening their AML/CFT systems. At ESAAMLG, he participated in more than seven AML/CFT assessments of countries and led some of the assessments. He is also responsible for FIU and CT/CFT related matters in terms of conducting regional typologies studies, overseeing the provision of the due diligence investigative process, reviewing the progress being made by the ESAAMLG member countries, and facilitate trainings on AML/CFT techniques and practices.
Mr. Dubale is a former Director of the Legal and International Cooperation Directorate at the Ethiopian FIU where he was responsible for establishing the first dedicated regulatory compliance and international cooperation on AML/CFT matters. In that capacity, Mr. Dubale routinely liaised with the different AML/CFT stakeholders from the private and public sectors in Ethiopia. Mr. Dubale was also part of the team in improving the AML/CFT legal and institutional frameworks and effectiveness of Ethiopia which resulted in the FATF officially removing Ethiopia from its list of Non-Cooperative Countries and High Risk Jurisdictions.
Prior to joining the Ethiopian FIU, Mr. Dubale was a Senior Lawyer at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Cooperation of Ethiopia, public prosecutor, university law lecturer and legal researcher. During this time, one of the projects Mr. Dubale was involved in included the detection, investigation, and prevention of ML/TF in Ethiopia and in the Great horn of Africa. As a prosecutor, he successfully assisted the investigators and prosecuted all cases ranging from government corruption, terrorism and terrorism financing to Money Laundering.