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By David Lawder
BELEM, Brazil (Reuters) - U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen launched on Saturday a new effort with Amazon basin governments to disrupt illicit finance that fuels nature crimes, including illegal harvesting of trees and other plants, minerals and wildlife.
Yellen said the initiative aims to increase cooperation among finance ministries, law-enforcement agencies and other entities from Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and the United States, to improve training to detect illicit finance networks operating in the region.
The efforts could lead to sanctions on groups responsible, cutting them off from the dollar-based financial system, Yellen said in announcing the collaboration in Belem, Brazil's Amazon gateway city that will host the COP 30 climate conference in 2025.
"Globally, nature crimes are estimated to generate proceeds in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually and often entail misusing and abusing the U.S. financial system," Yellen said, adding that such trafficking is upsetting the ecological balance of the Amazon rainforest, the livelihoods of local communities, and national economies in the region.
The Amazon Region Initiative Against Illicit Finance will seek to boost training, cooperation and information-sharing to enable law enforcement and finance agencies to pursue money-laundering investigations against transnational criminal organizations, drug cartels and other groups.
The U.S. and Brazil will organize a regional meeting in coming months to set priorities for the group and the Treasury will organize "follow-the-money" training sessions to boost investigators' capabilities, Yellen said.
The U.S. Treasury will also pursue joint investigations with participating countries against groups behind nature crimes.
Yellen said the Treasury has "no illusions about the challenge facing us. There is much more work to do."
"But bolstering coordination between the United States and our regional partners will help protect the integrity of the international financial system, while also targeting a major threat to biodiversity," she added.
(Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by Rod Nickel)
