FRANKFURT (Dow Jones) – Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) is pushing the fight against money laundering and financial crime. According to Spiegel information, he wants to set up a new federal authority that will bundle the fragmented competencies in Germany at a central point.
According to Lindner’s ideas, the new institution, whose name has not yet been decided, will rest on three pillars. The first, a new Federal Financial Criminal Police Office to be established, 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.
Finally, the third pillar will 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,” explains Lindner to Der Spiegel. “We have to consistently follow the money trail instead of being satisfied with uncovering a crime related to money laundering.”
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
August 23, 2022 00:47 ET (04:47 GMT)