Council adopts negotiating mandate on EU law on criminal finances

The ambassadors of the EU member states today agreed the Council’s negotiating mandate for a proposed EU law to ease the access of national authorities to financial information.

Access to financial information is an important instrument in financial investigations and in efforts to trace and confiscate the proceeds of crime.

In their fight against money laundering, EU countries will soon have to make information from centralised bank account registers available through a single access point. The centralised bank account registers contain data on who has which bank account and where. The proposed law would ensure that national authorities dealing with criminal offences would also have access to these registers through this single access point.

The Council proposes going beyond the terms of the Commission’s draft and requiring that financial institutions share transaction records (i.e. bank statements) in a harmonised format when they are sharing them as part of an investigation.

Background and next steps

An EU directive from 2019 regulates the access by law-enforcement authorities to information about the identity of bank-account holders contained in national centralised registries.

In July 2021 the Commission proposed amending the 2019 directive so that law enforcement authorities would be able to access and search bank account registries through a single access point.

Today’s adoption of the negotiating mandate will allow the Council presidency to start negotiations with the European Parliament.

In application of Protocol (No 22) to the Treaties, Denmark is not taking part in the adoption of the proposed measure.