A long road for the FIAU: meeting Malta’s anti-money laundering commitments
It has been a long road for the FIAU’s Legal Affairs Section as it coped with numerous updates to national legislation to bring Malta in line with AMLD5 and MONEYVAL recommendations. Jonathan Phyall, FIAU Head of Legal Affairs, and Daniel Frendo, manager of Legal and International Relations, speak about this journey
9 June 2021, 12:30pm
by David Lindsay
Earlier this week the Council of Europe’s MONEYVAL published a progress report showing significantly improved ratings for Malta in its fight against money laundering and terrorist financing from a technical perspective. Thursday’s report clearly acknowledged the progress made since Malta’s earlier evaluation, at times doing so quite openly when confirming that, “Malta was among the first MONEYVAL countries to implement the regulatory and institutional framework and conduct assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing risks in this a
Daniel Bilocca, compliance and risk director at NOUV, gives an overview of what legislative instruments have strengthened AML compliance in Malta.
2020 shall be remembered by Malta’s AML compliance experts for the numerous key legal amendments that have started turning the method of AML compliance enforcement over its head: the result of the publication of different acts and legal notices.
Malta’s initial step was to bolster its competent authority, the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) to safeguard its transparency. Malta’s very first legislative Act of the year implemented the following measures:
i. The FIAU was granted the right to establish, manage and administer a central bank account registry for Malta which as per Legal Notice 401 of 2020 (the Centralised Bank Account Register Regulations), shall contain ‘data and information on accounts identified by IBAN held by credit and financial institutions and on safe custody services provided by credit instituti