Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-04-04-Speech-3-277"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20010404.11.3-277"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, I too should like to welcome you this evening to the House. We have an important item on our agenda today. It is about fighting money laundering and there is a close connection between money laundering and international crime. International crime – especially organised crime – is not worth the trouble if the money cannot be laundered, which is why waging an intensive war against money laundering has been the House’s concern from the outset.
All Parliament is concerned with is preventing money laundering and all that is needed therefore is to trigger identification obligations above a specific threshold as and when financial transactions are involved.
One last point on the question of equal treatment. We have a situation in which the common position treats the various liberal professions completely differently, despite the fact that there are Member States in which they may sometimes work in partnership. It is unthinkable to have to apply rule X to certain members of a firm and a stricter rule Y to other members of the same firm. This sort of arrangement would not work and corrections are therefore needed in this area.
The European Parliament will endeavour to adopt this directive quickly. But we expect cooperation from the Council at long last, not obstruction by finance ministers at conciliation.
I recall that, in 1995, – when I first reported to the House on this matter – we called in our report on the Commission report on the application of the first money laundering directive for the Commission to table a new proposal for a second money laundering directive, because the first one was inadequate and only set a minimum standard. We confirmed this once again a few years later in Mr Newman’s report – at that time I was acting as shadow rapporteur for my Group. We therefore thank the Commission for initiating this legislative procedure.
We have tried, as requested at the Tampere Summit, to complete this legislative procedure as quickly as possible. Parliament made a huge effort, as did I in my capacity as rapporteur, to get the directive finally adopted in a single reading using the procedure provided for in the Treaty of Amsterdam. This proved to be impossible because the Council was unable to decide on exactly what it wanted until the summer of last year.
We then concluded our first reading at the Council’s request and negotiations continued. Unfortunately, it was impossible to reconcile Parliament’s and the Council’s positions up to the Council’s common position. That was mainly because the discussion in the Council was being chaired not by the ministers of justice and internal affairs, but by the finance ministers, who failed to approach a whole series of fundamental questions with the required degree of sensitivity.
As a result, we have to retable 27 proposed amendments from the first reading at second reading because, to all intents and purposes, the Council has taken no notice of Parliament’s views. It is therefore an utter mockery to state, as the Council does in its explanatory statement, that Parliament’s arguments and positions have basically been incorporated.
What are the core problems? The core problem is not the question of banning money laundering. That was decided long ago. All the Member States introduced legislation many, many years ago banning money laundering, be it by criminals, lawyers, bankers, whoever.
It is the reporting obligations which are at issue here. Obviously, when we include new groups of professionals in the scope of money laundering, we sometimes encounter problems because these groups of professionals are obliged to take certain measures. For example, lawyers have a duty of professional secrecy as regards the information entrusted to them by their clients. This is a fundamental right of the clients, a fundamental right which is also set out in the Charter of European Fundamental Rights which was solemnly proclaimed in Nice recently.
For this reason, all I can say is that, what has been decided here by the finance ministers is far too much and goes far beyond what can be reconciled with fundamental rights. The Committee on Fundamental Freedoms therefore had no choice but to ensure that the relevant amendments were tabled to plenary at second reading.
I would point out that the provisions of the current version of Article 6(3), which relate to an evaluation of the legal situation, have been interpreted very differently by the individual Council delegations and by the Commission and need urgent clarification. The identification obligations contained in this directive, as it stands following the common position, are overly bureaucratic and unusable. For example, it makes provision for complex identification obligations even in cases of little consequence and even where the lawyer and client are hundreds of miles apart."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples