EU should get authority to fight money laundering

In the fight against money laundering, the EU Commission not only wants to introduce a cash limit, but also to set up a new monitoring authority.

The limit should be 10,000 euros.

Brussels - In the fight against money laundering, the EU Commission not only wants to introduce a cash limit, but also to set up a new monitoring authority.

According to documents available to the German Press Agency, the Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA) should even be able to independently impose financial sanctions in the event of violations of EU rules.

It is also planned that it will coordinate the national supervisory authorities and support them in increasing their effectiveness in enforcing the European regulatory framework.

It had already been announced earlier that the EU Commission wanted to introduce a uniform upper limit for cash of 10,000 euros.

In addition, the planned package of measures against money laundering also includes the proposal to tighten the regulations for providers of crypto services.

This includes, for example, payment processing.

In the European Parliament, the EU Commission's plans are met with mixed reactions.

The CSU MEP Markus Ferber welcomes the plan to set up a new surveillance authority.

"We have seen that the European banking supervision is overwhelmed with the money laundering supervision", he commented.

Hundreds of billions of euros in suspicious transactions

At the same time, the EPP Group's spokesman for economic policy criticized the planned upper limit for cash.

"Not every cash purchase is a suspected money laundering case and you can also take action against money laundering with lower-threshold methods," said Ferber.

The Commission would do well to take national sensitivities into account and leave it to the Member States to decide whether and what amount there are cash ceilings.

According to the European Court of Auditors, billions of euros from criminal transactions are fed into the regular economy in the EU every year in order to conceal the illegal origin of the income.

The European police authority Europol estimate the value of suspicious transactions within Europe at the last hundreds of billions of euros.

The EU Commission wants to present the plans in one and a half weeks.

Then the member states and the European Parliament have to decide on the implementation.

dpa