EUROPE has obtained the text that resulted from the provisional agreement that the Council of the EU and the European Parliament reached on Tuesday, 6 June, concerning the revision of the directive (2019/1153) aiming to establish a single access point to facilitate competent national authorities’ access to centralised bank account registries (see EUROPE 13195/20).
The [appointed] rapporteur for the European Parliament, Emil Radev (EPP, Bulgarian) gave a summary of the text when the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs met on Wednesday, 28 June. For instance, the text extends access to financial information to the authorities responsible for prosecuting serious crime as well as Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs).
“The [European] Parliament and the Council [of the EU] have made other substantial amendments to the text”, said Mr Radev. The Council of the EU wanted to harmonise the technical means by which information on transactions must be provided by financial institutions, including cryptoassets and cryptoasset service providers (CASPs). “The idea is only for financial and credit institutions to provide this information in the same technical format so that the data [can] be immediately and easily usable”, explained the rapporteur.
For its part, the European Parliament introduced “supplementary guarantees relating to [...] trans-border access”. There is also a provision that Europol can assist during joint FIU investigations. Part of the mandate has also been transferred to the future ‘AMLA’ [anti-money-laundering authority]—the text for which is also in the process of being negotiated (see EUROPE 13194/19).
In the document, Member States’ permanent representatives (Coreper) are urged to approve the outcome of the negotiations. The European Parliament will also have to approve the agreement before it is published in the Official Journal.
Read the text of the agreement: https://aeur.eu/f/7ut (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)