Search Results for: European Union

Securely onboarding customers is a significant cost for financial institutions. Technology is viewed as a panacea, but processes are not as effective as they could be, in part due to the tech itself, but also regulatory issues, such as over data sharing.…

Universities in Somalia are facing heightened alerts as the country’s security situation continues to deteriorate. While Islamist militant group Al-Shabaab has been pushed away from controlling large swathes of Somalia, especially in the country’s south, over the past 12 years, it has recently increased terror attacks.…

FATF has released its detailed rules on how its fifth mutual evaluation round (MER) will proceed, with assessments beginning next year (2025) and continuing until 2032 (1). Its new procedures for MERs, follow-up reports and grey- and blacklisted countries under FATF’s International Co-operation Review Group (ICRG), are spelled out in detail.…

Legal professions worldwide continue to push against being integrated within comprehensive AML/CFT/CFP systems, with their firms arguing that conducting CDD/KYC and reporting STRs undermines client confidentiality, a cornerstone of practising law.

FATF’s recommendations allow governments significant flexibility on when lawyers should report suspicious transactions, contrasting with tougher requirements for bankers, payment service companies, and non-financial professions such as accountants.…

European Union (EU) member states are failing to implement mandatory sustainability reporting rules imposed by the EU’s corporate sustainability reporting directive (CSRD), the European Commission has concluded. It has opened infringement procedures against 17 of the 27 EU countries saying they have failed to properly write the directive into their national legislation: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Spain.…

The October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, and Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon, have hit the country’s higher educational sector hard, with roughly a quarter of all students, as well as faculty, called up to the armed forces, while budget cuts are expected as more money is allocated to the military.…

Companies and researchers are increasingly offering innovative coatings to help businesses and governments fight climate change, providing insulation, heat reflection and other energy-saving functionalities. These products also aid compliance with burgeoning legislation targeting net zero emissions by 2050 and meet intensifying consumer concern about the impact of climate change.…

The UK government is poised to launch talks with the European Union (EU) on forging a sanitary and phytosanitary agreement (SPS) that could remove British and EU food health checks that impede the trade in dairy products.

Dairy UK chief executive Dr Judith Bryans told DII: “A new sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) agreement with the EU has the potential to help in reducing trade administration costs for UK dairy exporters.…

The European Union (EU) has widened activities that can spark EU sanctions to include so-called ‘hybrid’ threats, such as undermining electoral systems and hacking, which it says are employed by the Russian state and associated Russians. As Ukraine continues to fight a full-scale Russian invasion launched in February 2022, the EU Council of Ministers has approved the legal authority for imposing sanctions on [people and institutions seeking to weaken governance in the EU as it supports the Ukrainian resistance.…

The European micro-states of Andorra and San Marino have signed an association agreement with the European Union (EU), which will more tightly integrate these small countries with the EU’s AML/CFT policies, programmes and legislation (1).

Both the Pyrenees principality (in 2011) and the Italian enclave republic (in 2012) had already struck monetary agreements with the EU, which allowed them to use the Euro and involved commitments to adopt “through direct transposition or possibly equivalent actions…implementing the EU legal acts [on] the prevention of money laundering” (2) (3). …