The European Commission presented a tax package on Tuesday, July 20, planning a new authority to fight money laundering and new transparency rules for cryptocurrency transfers. The authority will be the center of a single supervisory system coordinating the national authorities. New transparency requirements are also being studied to make transactions in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, currently excluded from EU regulations, traceable and non-anonymous. The new authority, which will be called Amla, will take over the powers currently held by the European Banking Authority and will directly supervise riskier cross-border financial institutions. For non-financial entities, the national authorities will take care of it, and will find a coordination center in the new agency. The anti-money laundering rules will be collected in a single binding code.
“We have had a number of very high profile cases in the past” and “the problem has not been solved,” said EU Commissioner for Financial Services Mairead McGuinness. Now the EU intends to “make sure that the rules are followed”.
If all Bitcoin or cryptocurrency transfers within the EU are to be traceable, this is not the case in the rest of the world. After the black lists of tax havens, the EU could also propose new lists of countries that do not have adequate rules against money laundering, with the possibility of sanctioning them.
