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EU officials took the unprecedented step Thursday of directly ordering a member state's financial regulator to improve its supervision of banks for anti-money laundering purposes. In an 8-page opinion, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, told Malta's Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit to react more rapidly and decisively when responding to AML violations, adjust its policies for assessing penalties, adopt a risk-based approach to supervision and keep "systematic and detailed" records of all offsite inspections. The Commission separately censured three other member states—Luxembourg, Denmark and Estonia—over failures to transpose all elements of the EU Fourth Anti-Money Laundering...