EU Anti-Money Laundering Regime: An Assessment within International and National Scenarios

Abstract

The present work is divided into three main parts. Part I aims at providing the proper background against which assessing the recent evolution of the EU anti-money laundering legal framework, by first illustrating the economic menaces posed by the crime at issue and, secondly, by accounting for the rise of new international standards and assessing the performance of a sample domestic anti-money laundering (AML) pieces of legislation. It outlines the serious threats posed by transnational laundering operations in the context of economic globalization, showing, at the same time, the key reasons for international responses to such a crime. We focus on the phenomenological aspect of money laundering (ML) as the necessary means through which criminal activity can live on and proliferate.