The article explores the historic and contemporary development of the EU supervisory framework in Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CTF). First, it makes the key argument that the development has an incremental or evolutionary nature where the operational capacity of the former 3L3 committees was gradually expanded in response to external shocks; such as the global financial crisis of 2007-2008. However, this development path has not allowed the ESAs to address a number of fundamental challenges in the area of AML/CTF. The article then analyzes the most important changes brought by the amending Regulation (EU) 2019/2175 to the intervention powers, governance arrangements and funding model of the ESAs. This includes the brand-new power to request a national competent authority to investigate possible breaches of Union law by a financial sector operator. On this basis, the article evaluates whether the amending Regulations in fact address the historic challenges of the EU supervisory framework in AML/CTF.
1. Introduction
From 11. Associate Professor, University of Southern Denmark. the start of 2017, investigative journalists uncovered a series of high-profile money laundering cases in the EU. This included the so-called Russian Laundromat where approximately 9.5 million payments from high-risk cust ...