Debate: The sixth Anti-Money Laundering Directive - Anti-Money Laundering Regulation - Establishing the Authority for Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism
Date: WEDNESDAY, 24 APRIL 2024
Speaker: Mairead McGuinness
Language: EN

And yet, I look to the galleries and I’m glad to see there are citizens listening to this debate, because this matters to you, your family and your society. And I hope you’ve listened to the colleagues who have already contributed, because this has been an enormous effort, because we were all focused on doing the right thing and doing it in a timely way. I want to thank the co-legislators and I want to list you in the order in which you have spoken: Luděk Niedermayer, Paul Tang, Eero Heinäluoma, Damien Carême, Eva Poptcheva and Emil Radev, the final speaker. I hold you all in equal esteem for the fact that you worked so well together and that we’ve arrived at this moment. I also thank the negotiating teams in ECON and LIBE, the chairs of ECON, Irene Tinagli, and of LIBE, Juan Ferdnando López Aguilar, and of course the presidencies: the Czech, the Swedish, the Spanish and finally the Belgian Presidency that got this over the line with you. When we started this effort, we knew it was not going to be easy, but there was an absolute imperative to improve significantly on the current situation. The scale of these reforms is unprecedented and the changes – the very necessary changes – we proposed are an ambitious departure from the status quo. I’ve said that we did our work in a timely and effective manner, and this was a priority for Parliament, Council and the Commission. So we did our work. So thank you for making sure we close this mandate with a reform that is truly transformative of Europe’s regulatory and interinstitutional setup, where we tackle money laundering and terrorism financing, because dirty money finances terrible crimes. And they’ve been listed already by colleagues: drug trafficking, human trafficking, prostitution, terrorism.  And I want to now briefly note how broad the scope is of this package. So from cash to crypto, from real estate to luxury goods and football clubs, we are targeting all areas where there is a real risk of illegal activity. The private sector will benefit from common EU rules, including on the sharing of information. National authorities will be able to cooperate with each other and to investigate suspicious activities and we have a new anti-money laundering authority with very broad powers, specifically to guarantee consistent application of the rules across the single market, to support early detection of suspicious cases and report to law enforcement to supervise the highest risk entities directly. And the reform benefits other areas of policy. Most obviously, it benefits our work together on sanctions. There are new provisions on implementing sanctions, on mitigating the risks of sanctions evasion and on strengthening cooperation between AML and sanctions authorities. So I think, overall, this demonstrates the EU delivering to our financial system, our economy and the security of our citizens. So once again, my deepest gratitude for this work and I look forward to hearing the rest of the debate.