https://sic.gov.lb/en/content/football-added-eu-money-laundering-risk-list

Professional football has been added to the EU’s watchlist of money-laundering risks, as the bloc admitted it faced a “structural problem” in its fight against illegal financial flows. Brussels identified football as one of 47 products and sectors vulnerable to being exploited by criminals. The decision follows a scandal in Belgium last year when federal prosecutors started an investigation into allegations of illicit fees paid to players and referees. “Professional football’s complex organisation and lack of transparency have created fertile ground for the use of illegal resources,” the European Commission said on Wednesday. “Questionable sums of money with no apparent or explicable financial return or gain are being invested in the sport.” Other new additions to the list include freeports — zones where goods can be imported and re-exported without having to pay tax or customs duty— golden visa schemes and non-bank ATM machines. The list was updated on the same day that the EU acknowledged more general failings in its fight against money laundering, saying a series of scandals at lenders such as Deutsche Bank and ING had revealed weaknesses in enforcement.

Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU commission vice-president for the euro, and Vera Jourova, the bloc’s justice commissioner, said EU rules were undermined by slow-footed regulators, poor co-operation between countries and a lack of basic due diligence on the part of some banks. “What emerges is a picture of ineffective compliance or even lack of compliance,” Mr. Dombrovskis said, slamming the failure of individual banks to meet basic requirements for properly assessing risk and reporting suspicious transactions. Brussels on Wednesday published detailed reports on the EU’s money-laundering challenge. Ms. Jourova said the documents showed that “enforcement is not proactive and dissuasive enough”, adding that “the price of failure is high”. The conclusions follow a series of cases that began with the collapse last year of Latvian lender ABLV. Others included the discovery of €200bn of suspicious transactions at Danske Bank’s Estonian branch, ING’s €775m regulatory fine for compliance failings, and revelations that Deutsche Bank was caught up in a vast Russian programme to illicitly shift criminal funds to the west.

The reports published on Wednesday underline that, while Europe has some of the strongest rules against money laundering in the world, they suffer from weak implementation. The studies warn of “a degree of regulatory and supervisory fragmentation . . . that appears ill-adapted in light of ever increasing cross-border activity in the union”.

Mr. Dombrovskis and Ms Jourova said it would be for the next commission, which takes office on November 1, to decide how to proceed. But they said options could include overhauling the European Banking Authority’s (EBA) decision-making structure to make it more independent of national influence, or handing more powers to the newly created European Public Prosecutor’s Office. Other steps could include revising EU rules to reduce the scope for national discretion, as well as building data systems to streamline information-sharing between public authorities.