Does the EU’s anti-money laundering strategy ignore the (Russian) elephant in the room?
Portia Kentish, 14 July 2020
With Europe’s parliament having now approved the European Commission’s new “high-risk” list of third countries deemed a threat to the bloc’s anti-money laundering (AML) efforts, several high profile critics are already voicing fears that it will do little to prevent illicit funds from being washed through Europe’s banks. This is particularly true for the Baltic states, whose vulnerability to money laundering networks based in neighbouring Russia remains an acute problem for the region.
The list of high-risk countries includes primarily African, Asian and Caribbean nations, which according to the EU “pose significant threats to the financial system of the Union”.
Yet according to the Tax Injustice Network’s financial secrecy index for 2020, these countries represent just 7.4 per cent of the world’s secret financial transactions. In 2018, the Commission cited a total of 54 countries which merited a risk assessment, yet the vast majority of these have been left off the list for what the EU calls “methodological reasons”.
