GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands (AP) -- The United Nations launched a drive yesterday to enlist secretive offshore havens in the struggle against money laundering -- appropriately, at a conference set on a tiny island that is the world's fifth-largest banking centre.

"The amounts involved in these financial scandals have gone beyond what the world community is prepared to tolerate,'' said Pino Arlacchi, a UN undersecretary general and executive director of the Vienna-based UN Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention.

The two-day conference, which is being attended by Bermuda, was aimed at getting offshore havens to adhere to a set of banking regulations laid out by the Paris-based Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development.

To put the problem in perspective, Arlacchi cited last year's case of at least $7 billion that Russian criminals moved through the Bank of New York -- and compared it to Jamaica's gross domestic product of $9.5 billion.

The fact that it was a New York bank was pounced on by George McCarthy, financial secretary of the Cayman Islands, who wondered why the United Nations' debut in the money-laundering battle focused on the offshore industry.

"Surely the issues involved must also be relevant to 'onshore' jurisdictions,'' McCarthy said.

The 26 developed nations in the Paris-based OECD are targeting countries with "harmful tax practices'' to fight the loss of billions of dollars to tax-free havens. And the United States is targeting states that allow criminals to legitimise their illegal gains.

Ronald J. Ranochak, a former US Federal Reserve official who is coordinating the UN forum, said the United Nations would offer technical assistance and training to countries "seen to move forward'' in the anti-money laundering battle.

Many of the countries require only a few thousand dollars to register a company that can then be used to shelter tax money or criminal proceeds.

Creating several such fictitious companies and shuffling money among them makes it even harder for regulators to detect its origin.

The task is made more difficult, speakers noted, by globalisation and technology that moves money from country to country with the push of a button.

Arlacchi said the tainted money included not only hundreds of billions of dollars in drug proceeds but profits from trafficking in migrants.

"This traffic has become so profitable that even drug traffickers are beginning to switch,'' he said, noting an estimated ten million people are smuggled illegally each year.

McCarthy said the Cayman Islands, a British Caribbean territory of 40,000 that holds more than $500 billion in deposits from foreign financial institutions, has tried to develop responses to money laundering, but noted that some jurisdictions cannot afford either the time or the resources.

Countries at the conference included a string of Caribbean islands, British territories in the Caribbean, several Pacific island nations as well as places like Panama and the South Pacific island of Niue.

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