News

Banks and other financial institutions in Germany filed a record number of suspicious transaction reports again last year, but the most notable increase came from real estate agents and notaries, two professions long accused of disregarding the origin of funds. In a 110-page annual report, Germany's financial intelligence unit, or FIU, gave a mostly positive assessment of the financial services industry's efforts to sound the alarm on potentially illicit transactions in 2020, a year in which the total number of STRs rose 25 percent from 2019 to exceed 144,000. The year-on-year increase of 29,000 STRs ranks as the second-highest ever...