The U.S. Treasury Department finalized its long-awaited customer due diligence rule Friday shortly after the introduction by the White House of a bevy of corporate transparency-related measures.
A pair of New York federal lawmakers Wednesday will reintroduce legislation designed to eliminate the purported ease with which U.S. corporate entities can be used to launder illicit proceeds.
Fifteen members of the Group of Twenty have failed to meet their commitments to beneficial ownership principles adopted last November in Australia, according to an anti-corruption watchdog group.
Draft U.S. Treasury Department rules on customer due diligence requirements for financial institutions would not prevent criminals from exploiting shell companies, according to Elise Bean, former staff director and chief counsel of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
This time last December, one might reasonably have expected that 2014 would be a year of modest changes for the anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance sector. Then came JPMorgan Chase, BNP Paribas and a convoy of Russian tanks to quash that notion.
Despite an ongoing push for greater financial transparency, few EU nations have signaled a willingness to require corporations and trusts to identify their owners, a nongovernmental group said in a report.
The U.K. is weighing amendments to its plan for a public registry of corporate owners that would allow individuals who control the firms to better protect their personal data.
A global anti-money laundering group Monday outlined how countries should identify corporate owners in an effort to stop criminals from hiding behind shell companies and other legal entities.
A U.S. Treasury Department proposal that asks banks to identify corporate owners could also end up shining a light on the often murky hedge fund sector, say attorneys.
European Union nations may still have to name the owners of corporations but they won't necessarily do so publicly, under the economic bloc's latest iteration of an anti-money laundering proposal.
Even with the parliamentary passage of the EU's anti-money laundering directive last month, tough debates lie ahead for the economic bloc's plans to better identify financial criminals, say observers.
Officials from 26 U.S. agencies and departments have begun a formal evaluation of the country's legal and regulatory vulnerabilities to illicit finance as required by an international anti-money laundering organization.
A dearth of trained staff, ineffective mutual evaluations and questions raised by last year's audit of Cypriot efforts to foil financial criminals motivated an intergovernmental group's adoption this month of new quality controls.
British officials are set to propose legislation that would require private corporations and limited liability partnerships to publicly disclose their individual owners, a U.K. minister said Monday.
A group of European Parliament members will soon weigh in on whether lawmakers should create an EU-wide police force and more closely cooperate on border security to stem financial crime, according to Bill Newton Dunn, a British lawmaker.
The U.S. Treasury Department has picked replacements for two recently vacated senior-level positions involved with the drafting of economic sanctions and anti-money laundering policies, according to an official.
A new grading system by an intergovernmental group on how effectively jurisdictions fight money laundering and terrorist financing is likely to compel global financial institutions to rethink their geographic risk-rankings.
A "quantum leap" in efforts to improve global financial transparency, including the passage of a U.S. anti-tax evasion law, has mitigated the compliance risks of offshore banking centers in recent years, says Martin Livingston, a partner at the Cayman Islands branch of law firm Maples and Calder.
For many anti-money laundering and sanctions professionals, 2012 will be remembered as a year of record fines. Banks paid billions to settle AML and sanctions compliance violations, with one penalty alone reaching almost $2 billion.
U.S. Treasury Department officials are weighing whether to exempt trusts and offer more flexibility on verification requirements in an upcoming proposal that would impose data collection duties on corporate accounts held at banks.