Edited by Isabella Fontana

The international standards of the Fatf (Financial Action Task Force) were issued in February 2012 under the Italian Presidency.

These are 40 Recommendations addressed to governments and competent authorities, financial intermediaries and professions subject to anti-money laundering obligations. The AML/CFT standards (Anti-Money Laundering/Counter-Terrorism Financing) impact criminal law, national policies, laws regulating the banking and supervisory system, the activities of the police forces, theintelligence financial and magistrates. These are therefore recommendations called soft law, not constituting a body of legislation issued on the basis of international treaties (as Community law is for EU countries).

The effectiveness and strength of international anti-money laundering standards lies in the fact that more than 200 countries are encouraged to seek a positive compliance rating in FATF public assessments, under penalty of entry into the lists of countries at risk (public statement). The listing involves a long and complex procedure of technical scrutiny on the legislative and policy progress of the listed governments, within the ICRG Working Group, dedicated to the lists (International Cooperation Review Group).

Among these Recommendations there are two in particular, dedicated to the transparency of legal persons (R.24) and trusts (R.25), which have received special attention due to the complexity of compliance, both from a legal and effectiveness point of view. Lately, the recommendation on legal entities has been reformulated, ten years later, and its new version was published on March 4, 2022 on the FATF website.

(https://www.fatf-gafi.org/publications/fatfrecommendations/documents/fatf-recommendations.html).

It took two years of intense negotiations among the 39 FATF members to reach the new text, which reinforces the recommendation for a multifaceted approach to achieving robust, accessible, and exchangeable data within the framework of international cooperation between authorities.

There are many systems for providing authorities with data on the real owners and/or controllers of companies quickly, robustly, and efficiently. The FATF has always been very careful not to offer a single solution to the problem of corporate transparency.A good data centralization mechanism must necessarily be accompanied by high compliance by the obligated entities and effective supervision by the authorities.

In fact, Italy, already in 2016, before the transposition of the IV AMLD (2017), managed to obtain a positive assessment of effectiveness on the issue of the beneficial owner, thanks to the average quality of the data obtained from intermediaries, subject to robust supervision and also to the notable effectiveness of the investigative actions, supported by the enrichment of the analyses produced by our UIF (Financial Intelligence Unit).

La Recommendation revised highlights the obligation to have central registers (not requiring the data to be made public as in the EU) or of equivalent mechanismsThis solution, which comes closer to the requirements imposed by the AMLD Directives (IV and V), is the result of a compromise with major non-European countries (USA, Canada, India, China), which had shown strong resistance to the possibility of establishing a single national registry.