Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) wants to make the fight against money laundering and financial crime a top priority. According to information from the magazine “Spiegel”, he wants to set up a new higher federal authority that will bundle the fragmented competencies in Germany at a central point.
The new institution, the name of which has not yet been decided, should stand on three pillars. The first, a “Federal Criminal Investigation Office” that is also to be set up, consists of an independent search area. Federal officials are supposed to work there who should be given real investigative powers.
The second pillar is to form the already existing Central Office for Financial Transaction Investigations (FIU). She is responsible for using sophisticated computer programs to filter out those cases from the numerous suspicious activity reports that the investigators are supposed to investigate.
The third pillar is to be a coordinating central office for the supervision of the non-financial sector. This includes, for example, the real estate industry and the gambling industry. In these sectors of the economy, a particularly large amount of black money is channeled back into the regular economic cycle.
“I propose a paradigm shift,” Lindner explains his approach to the “Spiegel”. “We must follow the money trail consistently, rather than settle for uncovering a crime related to money laundering.”
As the magazine further reports, Lindner is reacting to Germany’s massive failure to control cash flows. This weakness is attested to in the country in an as yet unpublished report by the International Anti-Money Laundering Institution (FATF), which will be made public on Thursday.
According to “Spiegel”, which was apparently able to view the report in advance, the verdict is “catastrophic”. “The FATF experts attest to Germany’s massive shortcomings in the cooperation between the federal and state governments as well as difficulties in getting to the bottom of complex financial constructions in money laundering,” the article says.
Experts have also been pointing out for years that federal and state governments lose billions in tax revenue every year due to money laundering.