Germany is preparing to punish money laundering efforts with brand-new legislation restricting cash deals in the property market, according to authorities. The legislation is focused on suppressing both cash laundering and other monetary criminal activities, Bloomberg reports.
“Our national risk assessment shows that we need to do more in the real-estate sector,” Finance Minister Christian Lindner said Thursday at a meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in Berlin.
The FATF, likewise recognized by its French name, Groupe d’action financière, is a worldwide cash laundering and terrorist funding guard dog headquartered in Paris, France.
The policymaking body establishes and develops worldwide requirements and promotes policies that intend to suppress unlawful activities such as cash laundering and the funding of terrorism.
Germany’s Marcus Pleyer, who is deputy director-general in the nation’s Federal Ministry of Finance, has actually acted as president of the FATF because July 1, 2020, having actually prospered Xiangmin Liu from China.
The approaching legislation follows the European Union in 2021 revealed the production of an EU authority, the Anti-Money Laundering Agency (AMLA), in a quote to take on big quantities of cash being washed into the mainstream economy every year.
According to authorities, the ALMA will “strengthen the supervision of anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism in all EU countries.”
“Financial crime generates billions of euros in dirty money every year. At any one time, we know that criminals are filtering at least some of their proceeds through the EU financial system” vice president of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis, said at a press conference in July last year.
“Our AML laws are now among the toughest in the world, but still not enforced equally across the board. And there are still loopholes in our financial system that we need to close,” Dombrovskis added.
The ALMA, Dombrovskis stated, will not change nationwide authorities however “coordinate them to make sure that EU rules are enforced correctly and consistently” while monitoring a few of the riskiest banks that run throughout several nations in the EU along with those that require “action to deal with immediate threats.”
The Commission likewise proposed a cap of €10,000 on large cash transactions.
Indicating specialists, Dombrovskis stated that approximately 1 percent of the EU’s yearly GDP is “suspect financial activity” which equates to billions of euros every year.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that between 715 billion and 1.87 trillion euros are washed each year, which totals between 2 and 5 percent of international GDP.
Last year, German financial regulator BaFin bought online bank N26 to pay 4.25 million euros ($ 4.98 million) for postponed submissions of suspicious activity reports in 2019 and 2020 in the location of anti-money laundering,
“N26 takes its responsibility in the fight against the growing threat of global financial crime, and in the prevention of money laundering, very seriously,” the group said in a statement at the time.
In March of this year, German prosecutors charged the previous CEO of payments business Wirecard and 2 other ex-managers with scams and incorrect accounting in connection with the company’s collapse in 2020.
Wirecard collapsed after a multi-year scam that prosecutors said expense banks 3.1 billion euros ($3.4 billion) in writedowns and loans.
H/T The Epoch Times