On Wednesday 19 February MEP Sven Giegold (Greens/EFA, Germany) presented ten proposals to feed into the European Commission’s action plan to combat money laundering (see EUROPE 12425/9), which is due to be unveiled on 25 March.
Although these are, for the time being, only personal proposals from the MEP, he hopes they will become positions shared by his entire group in the European Parliament.
In the first place, Sven Giegold advocates more regulatory harmonisation and the creation of an “EU institutional architecture to effectively fight money laundering”.
It should, in his view, be independent and be based on three pillars, namely: - the European regulator and the EU’s anti-money laundering intelligence services; - the European supervisor for financial and non-financial obliged entities; - the EU financial police.
“The European Banking Authority does not have the right governance and is too limited in its banking mandate for the task”, he said, while the debate is not yet decided among the Member States (see EUROPE 12384/4).
According to Sven Giegold, all entities, financial and non-financial, should be subject to the same high level of supervision. Self-supervision in sectors such as lawyers, notaries, accountants and auditors needs to be re-examined, he believes.
Furthermore, financial crime risks should be included in the calculation of bank-specific capital requirements, and the ECB should be empowered to withdraw the authorisation of banks that breach anti-money laundering obligations, irrespective of the assessment of national authorities, according to him.
The German MEP is also calling for a European framework for cryptocurrencies and stricter rules on ‘golden visas’.
See the document: http://bit.ly/39Jv4wj (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)