Brussels, 15/11/2013 (Agence Europe) - The Ecofin Council in Brussels on Friday 15 November discussed and broadly backed the draft fourth EU anti-money-laundering directive with a view to its adoption before the end of the year. Along with a draft regulation on information to be provided when sending money, the directive will adjust the EU rules to cope with new forms of money-laundering and the financing of terrorism by introducing the recommendations issued in February 2012 by the International Finance Action Group (IFAG). The controversial aspects of this are whether centralised information registers should be kept on the actual beneficiaries (how the information is to be stored and accessed) and whether the registers should include companies and trust funds; supranational risk assessment (the role of European surveillance authorities, particularly the European Commission, and what should be done with risk assessment findings); surveillance at EU level and the effectiveness of national anti-money-laundering measures (possibly introducing peer assessment); and the equivalence of non-EU country schemes and the penalties to be levied on non-cooperative jurisdictions. On the first point, a series of member states, France, Austria and the Netherlands, back the idea of making the central registers of real beneficiaries open to the public and to banks. France wants companies and trust funds to be covered by the register, but others would prefer this to be optional as long as information is supplied. France and Austria would like the European Commission to have the leading role on risk assessment and the option of issuing binding recommendations on member states and taking delegated legal action. Denmark disagrees, and Poland says the assessment by the Commission should be in addition to that of the member states. On the third point, the United Kingdom, Greece, Luxembourg and the Netherlands oppose the idea of the Commission monitoring the effectiveness of anti-money-laundering measures and also the idea of peer assessment, saying that this would simply duplicate the effective surveillance carried out by the IFAG. The delegations are divided over the idea of drawing up a European blacklist of non-cooperative jurisdictions and some want countries to have the option of choosing either administrative or criminal sanctions on non-cooperative jurisdictions. Italy says the directive should include special measures on the laundering of money arising from tax offences. (FG/transl.fl)