Financial Transparency Coalition

This article, written by the FTC’s EU campaigner, Koen Roovers, originally appeared on OpenDemocracy.net.  There’s an old saying that the legislative process is a lot like making sausages – it’s confusing, messy, and you don’t really want to know how it’s done. The European institutions in Brussels, the butcher shop in this case, decide how

Joint NGO Media Reaction Financial Transparency Coalition – Eurodad – Global Witness – Transparency International EU Office – Oxfam Brussels, March 11, 2014 – Today, the European Parliament endorsed the creation of public registers of who really owns companies, trusts and other legal structures. This will make it much harder for criminals, tax evaders, corrupt politicians and other money launderers to hide their identity, and their

In the coming days, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) will face a clear-cut choice: to move closer to ending financial secrecy, or to stagnate within the current system of opacity. The specific issue at hand is whether corporations should be required to disclose beneficial ownership information, which identifies who actually owns a company. The

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Justice Department has indicated it will step up its enforcement of anti-money laundering (AML) rules among financial institutions and boost its efforts to safeguard U.S. banks from illicit financial flows. As the article points out, this comes as no surprise to those of us who have watched this issue—prosecutors in the United States have been bringing more cases against banks using the Banking Secrecy Act and DOJ has aggressively pursued both domestic and international banks for deficient money laundering controls. The DOJ’s efforts are laudable, but unfortunately they expose a...