Council and European Parliament reach deal on access to financial information

The presidency and the European Parliament reached a provisional agreement on a proposed EU law to speed up and 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.

Access to financial information is a crucial instrument to trace and confiscate proceeds of crimes. Thanks to the agreement reached by the council and the European Parliament, our police authorities will have better access to illegal money flows.

Gunnar Strömmer, Swedish minister for justice,

In order to comply with a soon to be adopted anti-money laundering directive, EU countries will 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. Thanks to the agreement reached today, not only national financial intelligence units (FIUs), but also national authorities dealing with criminal offences will have access to these registers through this single access point. This will greatly help law enforcement and judicial authorities to fight criminal offences as they currently have to collect this information via the regular cross-border cooperation channels.

The European Parliament agreed to the Council’s proposal to require that financial institutions share transaction records (i.e. bank statements) in a harmonised format when they are sharing them as part of an investigation. A harmonised format will greatly help and speed up law enforcement agencies’ work.

Background and next steps

A proposed overhaul of the EU anti-money laundering directive foresees that law enforcement authorities would be able to access and search bank account registries through a single access point. As the new anti-money laundering directive will provide access to the single access point only to financial intelligence units (FIUs), the national body which collects information on suspicious or unusual financial activity, this directive was needed to ensure the same access to law enforcement authorities.

The agreement will have to be endorsed by member states representatives before its adoption by both the Council and the European Parliament. This adoption will go hand in hand with the adoption of other relating legislative instruments in the area Anti-Money-Laundering which are currently also under negotiation.

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