The expected approval of amendments to the EU's proposed Fourth Anti-Money Laundering Directive will shine greater light on tax evaders and financial criminals hiding behind shell companies and trusts, according to Judith Sargentini, a Dutch member of the European Parliament.
European parliamentary members are set to require countries to publish registries naming the beneficial owners of privately-held corporations and trusts as part of a broad overhaul to the EU's anti-money laundering rules.
Despite tightened controls on interbank messaging, some bankers looking to hide the role of their blacklisted clients in international wires need only type a single key on their keyboard, according to experts.
Defense attorneys are hoping to overturn convictions against their clients in dozens of money laundering, drug and other cases that they say may have been based on undisclosed national security data.
Examiners from the nation's top regulators of broker-dealers are investigating whether HSBC Securities USA sufficiently scrutinized and reported suspicious transactions, according to an individual with knowledge of the matter.
The top European Union official for civil rights said Wednesday that the U.S. Justice Department has yet to answer all of her concerns about a controversial American surveillance program.
Ongoing negotiations between the United States and European Union on a broad data-sharing arrangement will likely be complicated following the leaked disclosure this month of a transnational American surveillance program.
U.S. law enforcement officials and regulators have queried the nation's financial intelligence unit about securities settlements that use the world's top financial messaging platform, according to the agency's director.
Proposals to bar Iranian financial institutions from a global interbank messaging service would impose additional costs on Iran's banks without entirely blocking them from accessing Western financial institutions.
The National Futures Association handed out three separate fines to entities and individuals over AML violations, four Vatican priests have been charged with laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars, and more, in this week's roundup.
Countries should ease their privacy restrictions that hinder cross-border data-sharing on suspicious transactions, according to a Toronto-based intergovernmental group of financial intelligence units.
The rejection by the EU Parliament Thursday of a data sharing agreement with the United States is likely to leave U.S. investigators without timely access to European banking data for the second month in a row.
A renewed emphasis on customer data privacy in the European Union is making it difficult for U.S. financial institutions to conduct background checks on EU customers, and in some cases has exposed them to fines, according to legal consultants.
The Belgian-based consortium plans to open the center by then end of 2009 as part of an effort to restructure how financial data is transmitted internationally.
Because data protection laws in Europe and elsewhere make it difficult for a multinational financial institution to share data among all of its branches, the laws "will be the biggest impediment to protection from terrorism," the officials said.
The Bush administration suffered a setback Friday when a federal judge rejected its effort to block a civil lawsuit against an international banking consortium that provides the administration with data for terrorist investigations.
The agreement, announced June 27, resulted from months of negotiations after an EU advisory panel found that the consortium's sharing of information with the United States violated EU data protection laws.
A March report on national security letter subpoenas stated that some companies provided excessive information about their customers during terrorist investigations.
The new forms will be released Wednesday by the Treasury Department for a 60-day comment period.
An EU advisory panel determined that an international banking consortium violated data protection laws there when it complied with a U.S. administrative subpoena giving the Bush administration access to millions of private financial transaction records.