Brussels, 14/06/2010 (Agence Europe) - European Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström announced on Monday 14 June that the European Commission had initialled an agreement with the United States on sending banking information as part of the fight against the funding of terrorism. “We initialled the agreement this weekend,” the commissioner is reported by AFP as saying. “We got virtually everything we were asking for” in terms of protection of European citizens' personal data, she added. Last week, after Malmström set out the broad thrust of the agreement for MEPs, all the political groups, with the exception of the EPP, expressed serious reservations. MEPs' main concern is over supervision by a European authority of US Treasury data handling. Commission negotiators responded to these observations since there may be European supervision “at any time”, opening up “the possibility of doing something permanent,” a European source said. MEPs' second request relates to the legal authority responsible for monitoring requests for data transfer. The draft agreement states that Europol will fulfil this function, but MEPs want Eurojust to carry out this task, given that its role is both Community and national. MEPs' final request concerns the length of time that non-extracted data can be held - five years in the draft agreement. MEPs believe, however, that parallels with the anti-money laundering directive, where also data may be held for five years, are not convincing, since this latter refers to transactions that are already deemed suspicious. MEPs, therefore, recommend aligning the date retention system with European legislation on data protection which provides for data to be held for between six months and two years. Were the period of retention of non-extracted data to remain five years, the agreement might be challenged in the European Court of Justice. This Tuesday, the college of commissioners is expected to adopt decisions requesting the signing and conclusion of the agreement, which will still have to be approved by the Council of the EU before it can come into force. An informal dialogue is opening between the Council and Parliament so that this affair can be concluded rapidly. (B.C./transl.rt)