In a report published today, the Council of Europe’s anti-money laundering body MONEYVAL concludes that the Lithuanian authorities have improved their understanding of national money laundering and terrorism financing risks and have taken appropriate countermeasures. As a result, MONEYVAL has assigned Lithuania a higher international compliance rating in this area.

Since its 2018 mutual evaluation report, Lithuania is reporting on an expedited timetable (MONEYVAL’s enhanced follow-up procedure) due to the high number of deficiencies in several key areas. The follow-up carried out by MONEYVAL has examined a range of legislative, regulatory and institutional measures implemented by Lithuania to address these gaps.

The follow-up report also looks at the implementation of new international requirements for virtual assets, which cover among others the most prominent virtual currencies (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc.) and the providers of these assets. While MONEYVAL has registered certain progress in the implementation of the old and new requirements for virtual assets, deficiencies remained, and Lithuania’s rating in this area has been downgraded from “largely compliant” to “partially compliant”.

To date, Lithuania has reached a level of full compliance with eight 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-four Recommendations, and larger-scale deficiencies for the remaining eight.

MONEYVAL decided that Lithuania will remain in the enhanced follow-up process and will continue to report back on further progress to strengthen its implementation of AML/CFT measures.

***

The Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism (MONEYVAL) is a monitoring body of the Council of Europe entrusted with the task of assessing compliance with the principal international standards to counter money laundering and the financing of terrorism and the effectiveness of their implementation, as well as with the task of making recommendations to national authorities in respect of necessary improvements to their systems.