Lindner wants to do more to combat money laundering in Germany and, among other things, create a Federal Financial Criminal Police Office.
(Photo: IMAGO/dts news agency)
Berlin The Federal Ministry of Finance wants to strengthen the controversial anti-money laundering Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) through changes in the Money Laundering Act. This emerges from a draft law “to strengthen the risk-based working methods of the Central Office for Financial Transaction Investigations”, which is available to the Handelsblatt.
The aim of the law is to set up the “central office in its work processes in a future-proof manner” in order “to be able to do justice to the increased number of reports in particular,” says the draft.
The FIU had repeatedly made negative headlines in the past. Last year it became known that between January 2020 and September 2022 around 100,000 suspected money laundering reports were not processed further.
It also recently became known that between 2020 and 2022, the authorities had received almost 17,000 indications of other crimes, which the special unit only forwarded to the police authorities and public prosecutors a few weeks ago.
Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) wants to prevent such incidents in the future through a clearer legal mandate. The so-called “risk-based approach” of the FIU is to be specified in the law.
The selection of suspicious activity reports should be more precise
The task of the FIU is not only to forward reported suspicious cases, but also to analyze them in order to create real added value for the police and public prosecutors.
Without this filter function, almost every suspicious activity report in the past led to an investigation. However, the consequence was that so many suspected cases were accumulated at the FIU and not processed.
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The aim of the new law is “more efficient filtering and selection of reports”, which are then analyzed. The focus should be on reports of money laundering, related predicate offenses and terrorist financing, according to the draft law Simplify cooperation between the central office and the law enforcement authorities.
As a result of the events, Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) is also planning to set up a new Federal Financial Criminal Police Office, under which the FIU will operate. According to the draft, in order to make the work processes more effective in the short term, the changes to the law are to be initiated before they are transferred to the new authority.
anti-money laundering problems
A few weeks after the glitch in the processing backlogs became known in 2022, the then FIU boss Christof Schulte resigned from his post, “for personal reasons”, as it was officially said.
At the end of March, Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) appointed Daniel Thelesklaf as the new head of the FIU. Thelesklaf was already the head of anti-money laundering units in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
Shortly before, international experts had given Germany a mixed report on combating money laundering. Accordingly, Germany has a money laundering problem, experts from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) determined last fall. “Significant improvements are needed in certain areas,” the analysis said.
More: Combating money laundering: Authorities have only received half of all suspicious activity reports