European Council seeks better AML game
The European Council has released its latest action plan to better tackle money laundering and terrorist financing.
The conclusions set out a number of short-term non-legislative actions to address key objectives.
These objectives include identifying the factors that contributed to the recent money laundering cases in EU banks, to better inform possible additional actions in the medium and long term. Most likely, this has to do with the recent Deutsche Bank fiasco.
The Council also aims to map relevant money laundering and terrorist financing risks and the best prudential supervisory practices to address them.
It will also enhance supervisory convergence and better take into account AML aspects in the prudential supervisory process; as well as ensure effective cooperation between prudential and money laundering supervisors.
For banks, it intends to clarify aspects related to the withdrawal of a bank’s authorisation in case of serious breaches; but among regulators, it hopes to improve supervision and exchange of information between relevant authorities, as well as share best the practices and find grounds for convergence among national authorities.
Overall, the European Council aims to improve the supervisory authorities’ capacity to make better use of existing powers and tools.
The Council says that the European rules on anti-money laundering (AML) and terrorist financing have been considerably strengthened in the past years, with two consecutive reforms being adopted since 2015.
The latest revision of the AML directive, the fifth AMLD, was adopted in April 2018 and is due to be transposed at national level by January 2020.
In September 2018, the Commission also presented a proposal to further strengthen the supervision of EU financial institutions and to better address money laundering and terrorist financing threats, currently under discussion in the Council.
Here’s the full detailed action plan, with the next steps to reach these objectives.
