Slovenia has moderately improved its measures to combat money laundering and terrorist financing, demonstrating some progress in the level of compliance with the FATF (Financial Action Task Force) standards. The positive steps taken by the authorities have led to the upgrade of Slovenia from “partially compliant” to “largely compliant” in the area related to assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing (ML/TF) risks. However, there are still significant legislative deficiencies as regards the criminalisation of terrorism financing. These are the key points of a new follow-up report published today by the Council of Europe anti-money laundering body MONEYVAL.
The upgrade reflects Slovenia’s progress on carrying out a national ML/TF risk assessment and adoption of follow-up measures. MONEYVAL notes that the Slovenian National Risk assessment now covers such sectors as virtual assets and the work of non-profit organisations; a new Action Plan to mitigate the identified risks has been adopted; the number of employees of the Office to fight money laundering who might be allocated to high-risk areas has been increased. Due to its procedural limitations, MONEYVAL has not assessed the degree to which these measures have been effectively implemented in practice.
However, the legal framework of Slovenia still contains significant deficiencies as regards the criminalisation of terrorism financing. Therefore, Slovenia has not succeeded in meeting the general expectation of MONEYVAL, which is that countries should have addressed most - if not all - of the technical compliance deficiencies within three years after the adoption of the mutual evaluation report. This report for Slovenia was adopted in June 2017.
Under these circumstances, MONEYVAL decided to apply its Compliance Enhancing Procedures (CEPs) with regard to Slovenia. The first step of such procedures foresees inviting the Secretary General of the Council of Europe to send a letter to the country’s authorities requesting the necessary corrective measures to be taken.
Slovenia will also remain in enhanced follow-up and will continue to report back to MONEYVAL on progress to strengthen its implementation of AML/CFT measures. Slovenia is expected to report back in one year’s time.
