NEW FINANCIAL MONITORING RULES MAY BE ADOPTED IN THE NEAR FUTURE
At the end of September, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine supported the draft of the Law of Ukraine "On preventing and counteracting to legalization (laundering) of the proceeds of crime, terrorist financing, and financing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction". This draft provides for a comprehensive improvements of national legislation in this area in the context of adapting the latter with the provisions of the fourth European Union Directive 2015/849 and European Union Regulation 2015/847, as well as the standards of the Financial Action Task Force (on Money Laundering) (FATF). Among the main innovations of the draft the following could be emphasized:
simplification of the financial transactions reporting procedures for the subjects of primary financial monitoring (banks, insurers, payment organizations, etc.). For example, the amount of financial transactions subject to mandatory financial monitoring increases from UAH 150 to 400 thousand, and the number of features of such transactions decreases from 17 to 4;
application of a risk-based approach during the procedure of customer checks, transition to a case-based method of suspicious transactions reporting;
automation of the process of information provision;
increase of the period for informing a special authorized body on a threshold operation from 3 to 5 business days;
explicitation of the mechanism of assets freezing and financial operations stopping, strengthening the ultimate beneficiaries disclosure requirements; and
introduction of the obligation for payment systems to accompany money transfers with information about the payer and recipient of the transfer, etc.