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.
The government of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) said it has no plans to establish a central register of true company owners, despite pressure from Britain to adopt the anti-money laundering and tax
UK Technology Secretary Peter Kyle announced plans last month for the Regulatory Innovation Office (RIO) to work with the Digital Regulation Cooperation Forum to cut red tape, and support fintech innovation.
Near the top of the business headlines is the battle that Congress has started to wage with Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) over the taxes it pays. By some measures, the company barely pays taxes at all.
There are a handful of publicly listed cryptocurrency companies in the United States. These firms tend to serve as a good barometer of the state of the digital asset industry, at least domestically.