In a report published today, the Council of Europe’s anti-money laundering body MONEYVAL noted the continuing progress made by Slovenia to tackle money laundering and terrorist financing since the adoption of its latest mutual evaluation report in June 2017 and upgraded Slovenia’s rating on several points. However, deficiencies remain, notably with mitigating risks related to virtual currencies.
Today’s report specifically notes the positive progress made by the authorities in the implementation of its sanctioning regime for terrorism financing. It assigns Slovenia a higher international compliance rating for its efforts made in the areas of regulation of non-profit organisations, correspondent banking relationships, supervision and preventing the money laundering risks by politically exposed persons.
With the emergence of new international requirements, MONEYVAL re-examines the situation in the countries against these new standards. Today’s report covered implementation by Slovenia of new international requirements for virtual assets, which cover among others the most prominent virtual currencies and the specific service providers. As a result, while MONEYVAL has registered certain progress in the implementation of the new requirements for virtual assets, it has also found deficiencies , and Slovenia’s rating on the implementation of Recommendation 15 has been downgraded from “compliant” to “partially compliant”.
To date, Slovenia has reached a level of full compliance with eleven of the 40 FATF Recommendations, which constitute the international anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) standard. It retains minor deficiencies in the implementation of another twenty-five Recommendations, and larger-scale deficiencies for four (national risk assessment, terrorism financing offence, virtual assets, cash couriers).
MONEYVAL decided that Slovenia will remain in the enhanced follow-up process and will report back on further progress in one year.
The report was adopted by the 61st MONEYVAL Plenary meeting that took place in a hybrid format in Strasbourg in the end of April.
