The Council of Europe issued a stark warning to EU countries about their below-par performance in anti-money laundering. Following an extensive year of assessments, the Council’s AML monitoring body MONEYVAL warned that there was a “serious need to improve” across the board in its annual report for 2020, released on June 4, 2021.
“The report finds that the states and jurisdictions evaluated by MONEYVAL on average show a moderate level of effectiveness in their efforts to combat money laundering and terrorist financing,” the agency said in a statement.
MONEYVAL conducts periodic reviews of European countries’ AML readiness in several different categories – much as FATF does on a worldwide scale. Indeed, the two organisations work closely with each other in this effort.
With the report’s release, MONEYVAL’s chair Elżbieta Frankow-Jaśkiewicz did acknowledge that countries had continued to develop their AML defences despite the enormous setback of COVID-19.
Several common negatives were highlighted in the report, among them the weak supervision of the financial sector, sub-par compliance in the private sector, lax transparency, and lack of convictions for ML/CFT offences.