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Financial regulator in Europe has asked the EU to review its anti-money laundering safeguards after the group's banking supervisory group closed an investigation into the EUR 200 billion scandal Danske Bank.
On 16 April, the European Banking Authority voted against a draft internal report on supervisory defaults linked to Danske Bank, the Danish bank whose Estonian operations have been at the center of revelations of large Russian currency flows. unlawful last year.
The project, seen by the Financial Times, identified four violations of EU law in the way the bank was supervised by the Danish and Estonian authorities and recommended that both countries take follow-up action.
Instead, the supervisory board of EBA, the agency's main decision-making body, voted in favor of closing the investigation without adopting conclusions, which prompted sharp criticism from senior EU politicians.
"It is disappointing that the board of EBA supervisors has not reacted to one of the biggest money laundering scandals in Europe," said Valdis Dombrovskis, vice- President of the European Commission responsible for Financial Services Policy, Financial Times. He stated that the case showed that it was "essential" to adopt legislation to "transform" the way decisions were made at the agency.
The revelations of Danske Bank are part of a wave of money laundering scandals hitting the EU over the past 18 months, highlighting weaknesses in the application of the rules. European banks requiring banks to carry out due diligence on their customers.
The European Commission and MEPs have asked EBA, responsible for ensuring the consistent application of banking rules throughout the EU, to carry out investigations to find out what is wrong. Was not going.
The 45-page preliminary report by ABE on Danske identified violations of the right to organize, including "significant shortcomings" in the cooperation between the Danish and Estonian supervisory authorities, a lack of effective control over due diligence procedures reasonable by the bank and insufficient examinations of the audit. Danske's governance arrangements.
The draft report examines the period from 2007, when Danske acquired the operations in Estonia, to 2014, when the Estonian authorities carried out on-site inspections that revealed violations of compliance. It was prepared by EBA staff and a panel of supervisors.
According to those involved in the April 16 meeting, the vote on the report would have been split, with one country voting in favor of a violation of the right to organize and a number of abstentions.
In a letter to the European Commission dated April 26, the EBA said the draft report had been "definitively rejected" by the Board of Supervisors, made up of senior central bank officials. 39; EU and other banking supervisory bodies.
"A number of members of the Board of Supervisors, while acknowledging that the decline was a failure in the control exercised by the two authorities, did not consider that these breaches constituted a violation of the right to organize", said the EBA in the letter. A similar letter was sent to a group of MEPs.
But the explanations did not help relieve irritation in Brussels, where MEPs and others said the move reflected the agency's inability to take a tough stand with its own members.
Sven Giegold, a German Green MEP who has campaigned for a tougher crackdown on money laundering, said it was "scandalous" that the EBA chose to reject the report.
"The national supervisory authorities have ignored their legal obligation to act only in the European interest," he said. He urged the European Commission to use its own powers to open "infringement proceedings" against Denmark and Estonia in case of non-application of EU law.
Brussels proposed in 2017 that the EBA should have a full-time executive committee, so as to ensure "effective, impartial and EU-oriented decisions," but national governments resisted .
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