Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I believe that we have here a very good example of cooperation between the European Commission and the European Parliament. I should like to begin with a few words about the history of this proposal for a directive. Since as early as 1991 there has been a directive to combat money laundering in Europe. This anti-money laundering directive essentially forms the basis for national legislation to counter money laundering, which may incidentally be something which people at home in the Member States had not realised, because they always assume that this is the work of their own legislator. He will also have had a hand in it, but the origins of the fight against money laundering lie in the 1991 directive. Following the submission of a whole series of reports to the European Parliament – including from the Commission – it held a hearing on this subject in December 1995. The result of the hearing was that cooperation between the Member States suffered from grave shortcomings because the standard of anti-money laundering legislation was extremely varied. There are states, such as the United Kingdom or Germany, which have gone much further than the directive. Others such as Luxembourg have implemented the bare minimum, and inevitably this has caused serious problems. Even at that time Parliament called on the Commission to draw up a new proposal for a second anti-money laundering directive. This has now been done. We are grateful to the Commission for this, and I think that this is a good example of the Commission responding to initiatives emanating from Parliament and acting on them. On the other hand, I must also make a number of critical comments. I believe that the Commission has overshot the mark somewhat in its proposal. It has, as it were, extended the scope of the rules which apply to providers of financial services and banks to other professions, which are also to be covered by the second money laundering directive and which are to be obliged to combat money laundering. But rules which were intended for banks are simply not so easy to apply wholesale to advocates, tax advisors and auditors because, for example, lawyers have a particular duty of discretion towards their clients and a special relationship of trust. It was our task therefore to rectify this in our consultations at the first reading. I believe that we have succeeded in doing so. Today we have created a situation in which the principles of the rule of law are still upheld, but in which legal practitioners remain bound to secrecy if they are either representing their clients before a court or advising them on a legal matter. Only when lawyers fulfil the same functions as banks – that is, to administer property or money – is it clear that the same rules should apply to them as to providers of financial services, and I believe that this is also achieved through the amendments. I believe that we have made the identification requirements which were laid down more practical. It makes no sense for an estate agent to have to first have proof of a customer's identity before entering into business relations with him. This would make the job impossible. The amendments have also made this provision more practicable and realistic. In connection with the list of predicate offences we are critical of the fact that the European Commission has not defined the concept of organised crime. We rectify this in the amendments. Where fraud affecting the European Union is concerned, we have restricted the list of predicate offences to the really serious criminal offences, and we have not included any of the minor offences which appeared in the Commission proposal. At this stage I should like to express my grateful thanks for the constructive cooperation which we have enjoyed with the Finnish and Portuguese Presidencies, and I am sure that in our further discussions we will also cooperate fruitfully with the French Presidency. With this directive we tried for the first time to make use of the new procedure in the Amsterdam Treaty which makes it possible to conclude a codecision procedure in one reading. Unfortunately we did not succeed. But it was not Parliament's fault. It was the fault of the individual delegations in the Council working group which had not brought definitive instructions from their capitals, making it impossible for the Council to submit to us definitive texts which were ready for negotiation. That is why we decided in the committee even before the summer break that we would enter into detailed consultations now in the first reading, complete the normal procedure of first and second readings and then await the Council's common position. This should not, however, prevent us from continuing to seek to cooperate with the Council on this issue because the Tampere summit made the fight against money laundering its very top priority, and rightly so. That is why we must all endeavour to achieve improved anti-money laundering legislation in Europe as quickly as possible. I think that this evening in this plenary debate we are also making a contribution to doing this, and I think and hope that good progress will be made so that we will have a second directive to combat money laundering in the European Union very soon, which will then I hope also be swiftly implemented by the Member States!

Political group: PPE-DE