On Monday 12 February, representatives of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament came to a provisional political agreement on the proposal for a directive to facilitate the use of financial information for the prevention and detection of criminal offences.
The proposal provides law enforcement authorities and asset recovery offices with direct access, on a case-by-case basis, to bank information contained in centralised national registers. The objective is to enable these authorities to quickly identify the banks in which a suspect holds one or more accounts (see EUROPE 12003).
The co-legislators have managed to overcome their differences regarding whether financial intelligence units (FIUs) should be required to exchange information with law enforcement authorities, as the Parliament wishes, or simply be entitled to do so, like the Council wants (see EUROPE 12183).
Finally, the agreement provides that FIUs will be required to cooperate and respond in a timely manner to requests for financial information or analysis from relevant law enforcement authorities.
One of the last points to be settled during the last 'trilogue' was Article 9 on the exchange of information between FIUs from different Member States (see EUROPE 12189).
On Wednesday 6 February, the Committee of the Permanent Representatives of the Governments of the Member States to the European Union gave their approval to the Romanian Presidency to present a new wording for this article to the European Parliament.
This is the one which has been selected and provides that FIUs in different countries will be entitled to exchange information in exceptional and urgent cases but only if they are linked to terrorism or organised crime related to terrorism.
The agreement has yet to be adopted by both institutions. Once the directive is in force, Member States will have 24 months to transpose the new rules into national law. (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)