U.S. Rejects New European Dirty-Money Blacklist
List of 23 jurisdictions also includes Panama and Puerto Rico
The EU list includes Saudi Arabia and Panama, but it also U.S. territories such as the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, placing them alongside the likes of Iran, Syria and North Korea.
Banks in the EU will be required to use increased due diligence on financial operations involving customers and financial institutions from the blacklisted countries.
.. The U.S. Treasury Department said it “has significant concerns about the substance of the list,” saying its development was flawed. It said it didn’t expect U.S financial institutions to take the European Commission’s list into account as they carry out anti-money-laundering compliance... The U.S. Treasury said the European Commission didn’t include sufficiently in-depth reviews, only gave affected jurisdictions a cursory basis for the determination, told the jurisdictions they were going to be included only days before the announcement and didn’t give them meaningful opportunity to challenge their inclusion.
.. Policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic need to acknowledge that nobody is doing enough to combat money laundering, said Clark Gascoigne, the deputy director of the Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition, a consortium of research and advocacy groups.