EU: Location for EU Anti-Money Laundering Agency to be decided

The competition to select a city to host the new EU Anti-Money Laundering Agency (AMLA) is to get under way in Brussels, with Dublin in contention along with eight other cities.

Ireland is competing against eight other member states – France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania and Austria – to host the agency, which would create an expected 400 jobs.

The new agency will focus on combating suspicious cross-border transactions and the financing of terrorism across a range of financial institutions.

An announcement on the winning location will be made in Brussels at 6pm (5pm Irish time).

Dublin’s case has been pushed diplomatically by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Tánaiste Micheál Martin, while the formal case was presented to a joint European Parliament committee hearing by Minister for Finance Micheal McGrath and Minister of State for Financial Services Jennifer Carroll MacNeill at the end of January.

The case for Dublin is that it is home to 500 global financial institutions, including 17 of the top 20 global banks, and that it has a linguistic, common law and dispute resolution advantage over other contenders.

For the first time the European Council and the European Parliament, by way of the two committees, will jointly decide.

Ambassadors for all 27 member states will give their top three preferences in the first round of a secret ballot, and if there is no clear winner, the voting goes into a second and then third decisive round.

The parliament will have its own vote.