Investigations against the FIU: surrender to the money launderers

This Monday, Olaf Scholz (SPD) has to answer questions from the finance committee in a special meeting.

The subject: money laundering.

At the meeting in the final spurt of the election campaign, the Greens, the FDP and the Left have pressed because Osnabrück public prosecutors are investigating employees of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), a special unit of the customs to combat money laundering, which is assigned to Scholz's Ministry of Finance.

Marcus Jung

Editor in business.

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The ministry was searched last week.

The suspicion: FIU employees are said to have not forwarded information on terrorist financing to the police in good time.

A previously unpublished analysis shows how inefficiently the customs authority, which was little known until the Wirecard scandal, has worked over the years.

While the registered suspicious transaction reports more than doubled between 2017 and 2020, the Cologne-based FIU hardly passed any cases on to the police and public prosecutors after an initial assessment.

Only 0.25 percent of such reports led to the discovery of a money laundering crime last year, writes the management consultancy Pequris in its study, the results of which are available to the FAZ in advance.

The opposition finds the success rate shameful

"The chaos has been known for years and is undermining law enforcement and internal security," says Fabio De Masi, financial policy spokesman for the left-wing group.

"A success rate of 0.25 percent can hardly be measured statistically and must lead to a jolt in Germany!"

The Pequris analysis compares the FIU annual reports for the period from 2017 to 2020 with the respective police crime statistics (PKS).

The ever increasing discrepancy between reports and the success of investigations has its origin in 2017, when the then Federal Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) transferred the powers of the FIU from the Federal Criminal Police Office to customs.

The annual report of the special unit shows almost 60,000 suspicious transaction reports for 2017, two thirds of which were forwarded to the law enforcement authorities.

Driven by a continuous sensitization of people who are obliged to report under the Money Laundering Act and by the extensive automation of suspicious transaction reports in the financial sector, the incoming numbers at the FIU soared.

The number of suspected cases and the number of reports increases

In 2020, therefore, more than twice as many suspected cases were received (144,005 reports).

The number of messages passed on, however, sags. Only 17.2 percent went to the police and public prosecutors. The crime statistics document only 8942 money laundering offenses for 2020 - a decrease of more than 10 percent compared to 2017. The result of the analysis: Germany is losing clout in the fight against money laundering.

"The increasing number of suspicious activity reports to the FIU seems encouraging at first glance, as it shows an increased sensitivity to the topic of money laundering in Germany," says Christina Reinhardt, Managing Director of Pequris.

However, the drastic increase in the number of reports leads to enormous challenges in the selection, assessment and forwarding of suspicious activity reports, says Reinhart - here, cautiously, there should be "room for improvement."

There are regional differences, the analysis speaks of local successes in investigations: In Thuringia and Schleswig-Holstein in particular, significantly more money laundering offenses were cleared up than in 2017; Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and Saxony-Anhalt also report this.

In Berlin and Brandenburg, however, the cases recorded in the PKS have more than halved between 2017 and 2020.

No reform proposals can be derived from the figures

However, the numbers do not give an answer as to how the customs unit could position itself more effectively in the future - especially since its workforce has already been increased several times, as Chancellor candidate Scholz emphasizes.

Since the FIU itself is not assigned to any law enforcement agency, expanding its competencies could be a solution.

De Masi also calls for more criminal expertise from the FIU and an integrated approach to the fight against financial crime. He refers to a "financial police" modeled on the Guardia di Finanzia in Italy. De Masi emphasizes that this requires the FIU to be separated from the General Customs Directorate and an integrated team of investigators. “Customs have other skills, for example in the area of ​​tax fraud, which also make sense. However, the dominance of a fiscal perspective often does not help in highly complex money laundering proceedings, such as terrorist financing. "