Brussels, 13/10/2000 (Agence Europe) - The Justice and Home Affairs Ministers will be holding, on Tuesday 17 October in Luxembourg, a "Jumbo Council" in the company of their finance colleagues. The session - which will be attended by Commissioners Bolkenstein and Vitorino - will begin with a working lunch (at the close of the separate sessions that the JHA and Ecofin Councils will be holding during the morning) and will be punctuated by a brief formal session during which the Conclusions on the reinforcement of the fight against financial crime will be approved. The draft Conclusions are now the subject of broad consensus at the level of the Committee of Permanent Representatives. The text mainly deals with the following points:
- Major progress made in the fight against money laundering at the level of the EU since the European Council of Tampere;
- Relations with the uncooperative territories and countries identified by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and, in this context, the need to: a) negotiate judicial cooperation agreements with these countries and territories with a view to effectively tackling the problem of organised crime; b) measures to be foreseen against them should they refuse to commit themselves along this road (see our bulletin of 10 October, p.14);
- Common norms for transparency of structures used for economic and/or heritage purposes;
- Need to finalise the cooperation mechanism providing for: i) a future instrument on mutual recognition of decisions concerning the "freezing" of assets, in order to ensure their direct execution; ii) the creation, in each of the Member States, of national multi-disciplinary structures for the fight against laundering; iii) the strengthening of existing national provisions with a view to strengthening the effectiveness of the fight against laundering (EUROPE has reason to believe, in this connection, that the Fifteen would reflect upon how appropriate it is to foresee a control instrument for the crossborder movement of capital); iv) special attention to the fight against laundering operated through new information technologies.
