In Bremen, the state government recently closed the betting shops. Their number had grown steadily. The reopening is only possible if the origin of the funds used can be proven beyond any doubt. One wants to achieve in the Hanseatic city that clean operators can stay in business – but not those who open such offices for the purpose of money laundering. Even the required equity of 120,000 euros can come from shady sources if there are links to organized crime.
Money laundering is also suspected in parts of the catering trade. Larger sums are processed in the car trade, even larger ones in the real estate sector. With crypto values and the blockchain, completely new possibilities for obfuscating financial transactions have emerged.
There is a wide field between local petty crime and international big crime. The complex also includes terrorist financing, tax evasion and the global operation of oligarchs.
For years, Germany has been considered a country where money laundering is not sufficiently prosecuted and clarified. The volume of transactions in Germany is estimated at 50 to 100 billion euros a year.
The new report of the international authority called Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is to be presented on Thursday. As it is said, it is also critical again. Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) is therefore in the forward defense and has now announced how he intends to act. The most important point: He wants to create a new federal authority, with a new Federal Financial Criminal Police Office as the core, and thus centralize criminal prosecution more and thus improve it.
This makes it clearer than the coalition agreement. There it is stated that according to the Germany report of the FATF, the responsibilities for combating money laundering should also be reviewed. Lindner wants to tighten supervision and criminal prosecution – and thus also declares war on the federal states, because the prosecution of organized crime is a matter for the police. And the countries have the largest share in their work.
When it comes to money laundering, however, Lindner’s predecessors have already begun to expand the powers of the Federal Ministry of Finance. Under Wolfgang Schäuble, a unit of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) was relocated, which, under the name Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), assumes a central monitoring function for suspicious transactions reported under the Money Laundering Act by banks, financial institutions, but also from the real estate sector and even by notaries Need to become. Olaf Scholz’s contribution as finance minister was to expand the FIU.
But the unit does not investigate, it sifts through, sorts and evaluates the flood of tips and suspicious activity reports and forwards its findings to the investigators. The new Federal Police should soon be among them if Lindner pushes through his project. In addition to the financial police and the FIU, the third pillar of the super authority is to be a new coordination office for the supervision of the non-financial sector, especially the real estate sector and the gaming industry.
Lindner formulated his approach in the “Spiegel” as follows: “So far we have only been good at catching the small fish, the big ones elude us too often. Germany has to get better at that.” The FDP leader doesn’t want to leave it at just a little reform. He wants a “paradigm shift”. It boils down to tackling the fight against money laundering in completely different dimensions than before. “We have to consistently follow the money trail instead of being satisfied with uncovering a criminal offense related to money laundering.”
