The approach to money laundering and transaction monitoring must be more efficient, and therefore cheaper and less inconvenient for willing citizens and companies. The Finance Committee drew this conclusion in a debate with Minister of Finance Steven van Weyenberg (D66) about the fight against financial crime by so-called financial gatekeepers: banks but also notaries and brokers.
The House is in line with signals from the financial sector itself, but also from supervisory authority De Nederlandsche Bank, that the anti-money laundering approach in the Netherlands, resulting from the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Prevention Act (Wwft), can be improved. “The social costs have become very high,” chairman of the Dutch Banking Association (NVB) Medy van der Laan said earlier this week in NRC. At banks in particular, the strings have been tightened since a number of high fines due to failed anti-money laundering policies. One in five bank employees, 13,000 in total, now works on searching customer transactions for malpractice and checking customer files: where does a customer’s money come from, who is the real owner of a company?
Customers experience a lot of inconvenience from this when arranging their banking affairs, because they sometimes receive many questions from their bank about small amounts that they want to receive or transfer. Companies, foundations and associations only receive a bank account very late, or sometimes not at all, because the bank does not receive a file that is correct enough.
People who hold political office, such as MPs, face extra intensive checks. MP Doğukan Ergin said in the committee debate that his bank had canceled his pension account after he became a Member of Parliament for Denk in December. “I received a letter: congratulations on your membership of Parliament, you are now a PEP [politiek prominent persoon]. You take care of a lot of administration, we are a small bank and that is why we are going to close your account.”
In the meantime, all the extra checks and reports to the investigative services result in too few concrete convictions of money laundering. Van der Laan of the NVB: “We are now looking for needles in a huge haystack, but 90 percent of the suspicious pins we find are already known to the investigative services.”
According to NSC MP Eddy Van Hijum, the approach is now not balanced and “not proportionate”. Henk de Vree of the PVV noted that there are currently four times more people working at financial institutions as ‘gatekeepers’ than there are community police officers in the neighborhoods. “It is hopelessly inefficient.” According to him, there appears to be a culture of fear at the banks to comply very precisely with the rules. Ergin van Denk criticized the fact that the extensive checks very often affect people with an Islamic surname or foundations with a Muslim signature.
Minister Van Weyenberg acknowledged to the financial specialists present from the PVV, Denk, NSC, GroenLinks/PvdA, VVD and BBB factions that there may currently be “overcompliance”, partly due to political pressure to introduce even stricter legislation. feed. “A few years ago we had a number of major cases at all banks that did not have their money laundering organization in order. Large fines were handed out. It was all hands on deck.”
The question now is what the House wants and the minister can do to relieve the pressure that banks feel. According to Van Weyenberg, there is already much more room within the current Wwft to work ‘risk-based’, for which DNB also provided scope in enforcement a year and a half ago. Moreover, new European anti-money laundering rules will come into effect in 2027, which will at least partly overwrite the Dutch rules. According to Van Weyenberg, the precise implications of these rules have yet to become clear, because the precise legal texts of this Anti-Money Laundering Directive (AMLD) are only just becoming clear.
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Last week, the government largely withdrew a bill to further expand the possibilities of the financial gatekeepers on the basis of the upcoming AMLD. This Anti-Money Laundering Act proposed, among other things, to allow data exchange between banks, to jointly monitor all transactions and to put rogue customers on a joint blacklist. This is not possible under the new European directive. The minister now wants to amend the law, leaving only a proposal to cap cash transactions at 3,000 euros.
The Anti-Money Laundering Act has previously been declared controversial by the House – there was fierce discussion, especially around joint transaction monitoring. In order to be able to discuss the amended proposal, that controversial statement must be removed. In the debate there seemed to be a parliamentary majority in favor of this, but this will be finally decided on Thursday.
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