28 December 2018

Financial Times: Brussels seeks tougher anti-money laundering controls

Brussels is seeking tougher European-level enforcement of anti-money laundering rules after a spate of scandals that have shaken faith in the bloc’s ability to keep dirty money out of its financial system.

Valdis Dombrovskis, the European Commission’s vice-president in charge of the euro, told the Financial Times in an interview that Brussels was already thinking about how to go beyond “quick fix” proposals it made in September for reinforcing supervision of banks’ conduct.

Those plans, which have already won support from governments, would give the EU’s European Banking Authority greater powers to co-ordinate the work of national banking watchdogs.

Mr Dombrovskis said the measures would spur “convergence” of supervisory standards across the EU. But he said there was scope to go further and that his officials were looking at “more long term, more structural solutions” to present options to governments in 2019.

The enforcement of anti-money laundering rules has shot up the political agenda after allegations that EU banks were being used for everything from laundering the proceeds of crime to funnelling money to North Korea’s nuclear programme. [...]

“You see those money laundering scandals across the EU,” Mr Dombrovskis said. “It is not concentrated in a few countries and therefore we think we need to act.”

“The main problem is not that we do not have anti-money laundering rules,” he said. “We have . . . rules and actually quite strict ones. So the question is how uniformly they are enforced across the EU.” [...]

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