Central Office for Financial Transaction Investigations

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Center for Financial Transaction studies
(Financial Intelligence Unit - FIU)

logo
State level Federation
position Organizational unit of the General Customs Directorate (Directorate X)
Supervisory authority Federal Ministry of Finance
head office Cologne
Authority management Christof Schulte (Head of Department DVIII.D in the ZKA)
Servants about 500
Web presence www.zoll.de

Central Office for Financial Transaction Investigations is the official name of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) in Germany . It is the national central office for receiving, collecting and evaluating reports on suspicious financial transactions that could be related to money laundering or terrorist financing .

The central office for suspicious transaction reports in connection with the attacks of September 11, 2001 was created . Initially located in the Federal Criminal Police Office , the FIU was a department of the General Customs Directorate from June 26, 2017 to April 30, 2021 , where it belonged to Directorate VIII - Customs Criminal Police Office . On May 1, 2021, the FIU was integrated from Directorate VIII into a separate Directorate X of the General Customs Directorate .

Criticism and problems

Since the change to the responsibility of customs , the central office has been heavily criticized because of its way of working and the speed at which information is passed on to the law enforcement and investigative authorities. In May 2019, more than 36,000 reports were not processed or not fully processed. Customs stated that this was due to the poor quality of the reported data, which required queries, as well as a recently increasing number of reports. In 2020, a total of 144,005 suspicious transaction reports were forwarded to the FIU. According to a Munich chief public prosecutor, most of them have little substance. According to a study commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Finance, only 562 of 99,000 suspected cases investigated (i.e. 0.6 percent) led to successful criminal proceedings between 2014 and 2016 . Another problem is that the FIU cannot independently access the at least 16 different databases of the police and judicial authorities of the federal states. The Federal Audit Office also criticized this fact .

Since February 2020, the Osnabrück public prosecutor's office has been investigating the FIU for obstruction of punishment in the office. In September 2021, she therefore had the Federal Ministry of Finance and the Federal Ministry of Justice in Berlin searched.

The politician and board member of the citizens' movement Finanzwende Gerhard Schick reported in September 2021 that practically no suspected money laundering cases have been reported in the vulnerable areas of jewelry stores , used car sales and the real estate sector . Instead, almost all reports come from cashless payment transactions, but this information is apparently often ignored, as the example of Wirecard shows, in which the German FIU only found out afterwards that it had over 100 suspicious transaction reports that it had not forwarded to the public prosecutor's office . In the Wirecard case , it took a year and a half for the FIU to forward a detailed suspicious transaction report from Commerzbank to the prosecutors. According to Kai Bussmann , the FIU hardly pursues complicated international transactions .

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See www.behoerden-spiegel.de .
  2. ↑ Official name of the agency in accordance with Section 27 of the Money Laundering Act . In: gesetze-im-internet.de, accessed on July 14, 2020
  3. ↑ Information on Directorate X - Central Office for Financial Intelligence Unit - Technical information on the FIU on Zoll.de, as seen on June 29, 2021
  4. ↑ Jörg Diehl: Money Laundering Special Unit - The unbearable slowness of customs. In: Spiegel Online. August 9, 2018. Retrieved August 9, 2018 .
  5. ↑ At customs, suspicious activity reports are backing up tagesschau.de.
  6. ^ A b Anne Seith, Gunther Latsch, Martin Hesse, Jörg Diehl, David Böcking, Tim Bartz: Money laundering: Germany, a paradise for money launderers. In: Der Spiegel. Retrieved September 2, 2021 .
  7. ^ Ansgar Siemens, Jörg Diehl: Investigators take action against special customs unit. In: Der Spiegel. July 14, 2020, accessed September 2, 2021 .
  8. ^ Ansgar Siemens, Jörg Diehl: Alleged thwarting of punishment by customs special unit - raid in the Ministry of Finance. In: Der Spiegel. September 9, 2021, accessed September 9, 2021 .
  9. ↑ Gerhard Schick on the black money problem - "Germany ignored the topic of money laundering for many years". Retrieved September 2, 2021 (German).