Ricardo
Liáo
President of the Financial Activities Control Council (Coaf) since August 21, 2019, having previously served as the pro-tempore President of Gafilat in 2021, Director of Supervision at Coaf from January to August 2019, working in the areas of regulation, oversight, and punitive administration related to the entities supervised by the agency. He was the Executive Secretary of Coaf from April 2013 to January 2019, focusing on supervision, institutional development, management, and information technology. A career employee of the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB), he served as an Advisor (1986 - 1991), Deputy Head (1991 - 1996), Consultant in the Inspection Department, and Head of Department (1996 - 1999), and in the supervision area of the National Financial System focusing on anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CTF) from 1999 to 2012. He also served as a BCB representative Councilor at Coaf’s Plenary from 1998 to 2012. He participated in official missions representing Brazil (BCB and Coaf) in FATF, Gafilat, and Egmont, as well as several speeches on AML/CTF topics at technical seminars between 2000 and 2023, and in the National Strategy to Combat Corruption and Money Laundering – Enccla, from 2013 to 2023. He holds a degree in Economics from the Faculty of Technology and Applied Social Sciences at the University Center of Brasília – UniCEUB, completed in March 1979.
COAF | FATF description (Brazil MER):
The Council for Financial Activities (COAF) is the financial intelligence unit of Brazil, and the central authority of the system to prevent and combat money laundering, terrorist financing and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (AML/CFTP), especially in the receipt, analysis and dissemination of financial intelligence information. It is also a council that provides a multi-agency forum involving heads of several government agencies responsible for aspects of Brazil’s AML/CFTP system. The COAF Plenary meets monthly and comprises the President and representatives of: BACEN, CVM, SUSEP, the General Attorney Office of the National Treasury, ABIN, the Federal Police, the Secretariat of Federal Revenue (RFB), the MRE, the Ministry of Justice and the CGU. COAF is also responsible for regulating entities in the financial and DNFBP sectors that are not subject to regulation by other governmental institutions. COAF, created by Law No. 9613 in 1998 and restructured in 2020, is administratively linked to the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB), endowed with of technical and operational autonomy. Previously, it was part of Ministry of Finance, and briefly, the Ministry of Justice.