Among the raft of measures to tackle terrorism and crime (see other articles) presented by the European Commission on Tuesday 17 April, are new rules to facilitate the use of financial information for preventing and detecting criminal offences.
In a press release, the Commission indicates, “The current mechanisms for accessing and exchanging financial information are slow compared to the fast pace at which funds can be transferred across Europe and globally”.
The draft directive now calls for direct access on a case-by-case basis for the law enforcement agencies and offices responsible for recovering assets, to banking information included in centralised national registers. The objective would be to enable these authorities to rapidly identify the banks in which a suspect has one or several accounts.
The competent authorities will therefore have access to limited information (name and date of birth of the account holder and their account number), which is strictly necessary for identifying with which banks the suspect involved in the investigation has his accounts. They will not have access to what is contained in the bank accounts or the details of transactions.
Once the authorities have identified the financial institution concerned, they will then have to address a request for additional information, for example, if it wishes to obtain a list of transactions.
The directive also implements strict safeguards, as emphasised to the press by the European Commissioner for the Security Union, Julian King, and his counterpart for Justice, Věra Jourová. This information can only be provided in specific terrorism cases or others relating to serious crime.
The directive also seeks to improve cooperation between the national law enforcement agencies and national financial intelligence cells, as well as between the member states themselves. Stricter deadlines have also been set out for information exchanges, namely, a three-day maximum after receiving a request and 24 hours in urgent and exceptional cases, through secure communication channels.
For the draft directive please see the following link: https://bit.ly/2qzrrVB. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)