Strasbourg, 21.12.2012 – The Council of Europe’s MONEYVAL Committee published today a report with a detailed action plan on measures to combat money laundering and terrorist financing in Georgia.

The assessment highlights the country’s improvement in legislation with respect to the criminalisation of money laundering and financing of terrorism and the preventive measures for financial institutions. Progress has also been made with regard to the effective use of the money laundering criminal provisions and significant sums have been confiscated in the context of money laundering offences since 2005.

Georgia exchanges information with international Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) and its framework for mutual legal assistance is solid and allows for the provision of a wide range of assistance to foreign countries in the context of criminal investigations and prosecutions.

However, the report underlines that weaknesses remain with regard to compliance with key elements of the standards, such as the effectiveness of the financial intelligence unit.

In addition, there are still major loopholes in the transparency of legal entities, measures to prevent terrorist financing and preventive measures for designated non-financial business and professions (DNFBPs). With the exception of notaries, DNFBPs are not supervised.

The Financial Intelligence Unit needs to strengthen performance of its core functions. Moreover, the lack of analytical tools, the weak quality of reporting and the limited access to information results in a poor quality of analysis of suspicious transaction reports.

The report was prepared in co-operation with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). MONEYVAL will continue to monitor implementation of the recommendations by Georgia through its regular procedures, which require the country to submit a follow up report by July 2014.

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The Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism (MONEYVAL) is a Council of Europe body that assesses compliance with the relevant international and European standards to counter money laundering and terrorist financing, and makes recommendations to national authorities. 28 Council of Europe member states are currently subject to MONEYVAL’s evaluation procedures, as well as 5 other jurisdictions (Israel, the Holy See including the Vatican City State, and the UK Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man).

Link to executive summary

Link to the addendum