We have a whole arsenal of international weapons with which to fight money laundering including, most importantly, the 1991 Community directive, together with the United Nations Convention against illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances, adopted in Vienna on 19 December 1988, the Council of Europe Convention on laundering, search, seizure and confiscation of the proceeds from crime and the forty recommendations by the FATF (Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering), which is the main international body specialising in the fight against money with criminal origins. We all agree on the need – and Parliament has called on several occasions – for a review of the 1991 directive, which already goes much further than the 40 recommendations made by the FATF in 1996 and which has been applied successfully by the Member States. But those responsible for money laundering are highly ingenious when it comes to finding ways of disguising the criminal origins of their money, which is why it has been proposed not just to update the directive but also to extend its scope. I should like to point out the following so that we avoid using a sledgehammer to crack a nut by succumbing to the risk of making the scope of the directive so vast that it becomes ineffectual. That is why the criminal activities associated with the concept of money laundering need to be very clearly defined, in order to prevent the requirements of the directive from being extended to fraudulent activities in general in relation to money circulating legitimately in the financial system. We must not forget that the Member States have their own national laws for dealing with such offences. Subsidiarité oblige! As for extending the obligations imposed by the directive to certain non-financial activities and professions, especially to members of the legal profession, we must not infringe the right of clients to professional confidentiality, the right of clients to access the justice system and the right not to incriminate themselves and, finally, the confidential role of lawyers in preventing crime. As several French Socialist Members have claimed the right during the debate on the fight against money laundering to put certain countries in the hot seat, including mine, on the basis of an erroneous, approximate and aberrant appraisal of the practices of Luxembourg as a financial centre and the Luxembourg political powers, I am anxious to refute here in the House, and as vigorously as our Prime Minister and the chairmen of the finance, budget and legal committees of the Chamber of Deputies of the Grand Duchy have done, the allegations which the French Socialist Members have become guilty of during their so-called ‘assault course’ against dirty money. Those who feel the urge to denounce the black sheep in the fight against money laundering and put pressure on tax havens should go right ahead; but they should at least exert pressure on those who really baulk at helping in the fight against money laundering and, more importantly, they should refrain from automatically classifying countries which respect banking secrecy as ‘turntables for dirty money’. You do not need banking secrecy in order to become a turntable for dirty money. The proof is that the Russian mafia tried to invest its dirty money in several European financial centres before deciding on New York, which does not recognise banking secrecy. This proves that abolishing banking secrecy is no guarantee of protection against the ravages of drug trafficking, organised crime and corruption and we would do well to remember that!

Political group: PPE-DE