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In order to comply with a soon to be adopted anti-money laundering directive, EU countries will have to make information from centralised bank account registers available through a single access point. The centralised bank account registers contain data on who has which bank account and where. Thanks to the agreement reached today, not only national financial intelligence units (FIUs), but also national authorities dealing with criminal offences will have access to these registers through this single access point. This will greatly help law enforcement and judicial authorities to fight criminal offences as they currently have to collect this information via the regular cross-border cooperation channels.
The European Parliament agreed to the Council’s proposal to require that financial institutions share transaction records (i.e. bank statements) in a harmonised format when they are sharing them as part of an investigation. A harmonised format will greatly help and speed up law enforcement agencies’ work.
A proposed overhaul of the EU anti-money laundering directive foresees that law enforcement authorities would be able to access and search bank account registries through a single access point. As the new anti-money laundering directive will provide access to the single access point only to financial intelligence units (FIUs), the national body which collects information on suspicious or unusual financial activity, this directive was needed to ensure the same access to law enforcement authorities.
The agreement will have to be endorsed by member states representatives before its adoption by both the Council and the European Parliament. This adoption will go hand in hand with the adoption of other relating legislative instruments in the area Anti-Money-Laundering which are currently also under negotiation.