The anti-money laundering unit Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) will soon have a new boss. The Swiss Daniel Thelesklaf takes over the office at the beginning of July, as the Federal Ministry of Finance announced on Wednesday in Berlin. Thelesklaf has decades of experience in fighting financial crime. He is currently working at the United Nations as project manager of the “Finance against slavery and human trafficking” initiative. The lawyer previously headed the FIU in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
The replacement took a while. The previous FIU boss Christof Schulte was relieved of his duties as early as December 2022. Under his direction, the agency fell behind in processing hundreds of thousands of suspicious activity reports. In the meantime, a task force has reduced the open old stock to around 30,000 reports. However, many new reports are added to the database every day. “It was long overdue that this personnel gap be closed. The new FIU boss has to set up this authority practically from scratch because so much is in trouble,” said Konrad Duffy, financial expert of the citizens’ movement Finanzwende. The backlog of suspicious activity reports must be reduced as soon as possible.
Many financial institutions would rather report too much than too little
Banks, financial service providers, real estate agents, car sellers and many other goods dealers are obliged under the Money Laundering Act to report if, for example, cash payments appear suspicious when selling jewelry or a car. The FIU collects and analyzes these suspicious transaction reports and must forward the most important cases to the responsible investigative authorities. However, that often didn’t work. Even suspicious reports about Wirecard remained for a long time. At the same time, many obliged entities prefer to report one too many than too few. In this way, the financial institutions save themselves possible trouble with supervision. But at the same time they are clogging up the FIU’s data pool with “little stuff”.
Mafia-like organizations, dictators, autocratic secret services, oligarchs and kleptocrats launder around 100 billion euros a year in Germany – from their criminal dealings in people, drugs and weapons. The amount corresponds to about a quarter of the federal budget. A confiscation of suspicious assets, as is practiced in Italy with mafia assets, has so far been a long time coming in Germany. “In Germany we take great care of the small fish in financial crime. But the big fish swim away from us,” said Lindner in August. So you want to get to the backers. To do this, follow the money trail.
His ministry is now working on setting up a new higher federal authority to combat financial crime. The corresponding draft law should be presented before the end of this year, according to sources in the Ministry of Finance. The development of the authorities will then begin in 2024. The goal is 1000 to 2000 employees. Under the umbrella of the super authority, a new Federal Financial Criminal Police Office is also planned for the hunt for the “big fish”. The FIU should also work for this higher authority. Hard work awaits their future boss, Thelesklaf. The omissions at the FIU are so serious that the public prosecutor’s office in Osnabrück has been investigating for years on suspicion of frustration in the office.