The Council of Europe’s anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing body MONEYVAL on Tuesday warned that the recovery of proceeds from crime across 26 states is poor, calling on governments to step up their efforts to strengthen international frameworks for asset management and recovery.
In its annual report for 2022, MONEYVAL found that successful confiscations of criminal assets are relatively rare compared with the estimates of the proceeds of crime.
It, therefore, “underlines the need not only to freeze but also to seize and confiscate criminal funds. To achieve this, enhancing the powers and resources of criminal asset recovery and management offices is crucial,” it said in its monitoring work.
“States should not only improve their results in identifying and freezing criminal funds. There is also an urgent need for them to greatly improve their results in confiscating and managing criminal assets, adopt stricter sanctions and increase the number of convictions for serious money laundering offenses”, said Elżbieta Frankow-Jaśkiewicz, chair of MONEVYAL.
“Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine has highlighted the link between authoritarian regimes, corrupt actors and illicit financial flows. The need to deny illicit actors access to the funds and resources used to facilitate harmful activities, including those that can undermine European security and stability,” has become more apparent.
She called on governments to invest more in combating money laundering and terrorist financing and to adopt stricter policies to prevent the laundering of proceeds associated with corrupt regimes.
In its annual report, MONEYVAL assesses compliance with international standards and developments in the legal and institutional frameworks to counter money laundering and the financing of terrorism in the 33 states and territories subject to its monitoring as of 31 December 2022.
MONEYVAL states and territories continued, on average, to demonstrate a moderate level of effectiveness in combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism. The best results were achieved in risk management, international cooperation and the use of financial intelligence. Compliance with international standards remained particularly weak in financial sector supervision, private sector compliance, transparency of legal persons, money laundering convictions and confiscations, and sanctions for terrorism financing and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
With regard to technical compliance with recommendations concerning legislative and institutional reforms, MONEYVAL members showed excellent results: they fully implemented 72% of the recommendations.
By the end of 2022, 21 of the 26 states and territories evaluated by MONEYVAL in the 5th round of mutual evaluations were subject to its enhanced follow-up procedure for their limited level of compliance with AML/CFT standards: Albania, Andorra, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Gibraltar, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Monaco, Malta, Poland, Republic of Moldova, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, the UK Crown Dependency of the Isle of Man and Ukraine, Armenia, the Holy See, Liechtenstein, San Marino and Israel.
