Individual staff should be fined up to €5 million and firms, such as banks, should be fined 10 percent of turnover if they flout anti-money-laundering rules, the European Commission has proposed.
It put out its latest bill on the subject with little fanfare in Strasbourg on Tuesday (5 February).
But its communique noted that the criminal practice, worth up to €1.2 trillion a year worldwide, creates “high risk … to the stability of the financial system.”
One of the bill’s sponsors, home affairs commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom, a Swede who visits shelters for trafficked women in the Balkans, added that it helps people who peddle drugs and guns or who shut up women in brothels to enjoy respectability and luxury lifestyles.
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