Ethics and governance in the European Financial centers

PwC has developed an Anti-Money Laundering: Know Your Customer quick reference guide.

This excellent work is a quick and easy way of comparing anti-money laundering issues for nearly 50 countries and includes additional links to useful information such as Financial Action Task Force (FATF) reports and country evaluations.

Know more

We have seen in a previous article that PricewaterhouseCoopers has released its fourth Global Economic Crime Survey, based on interviews with more than 5,400 senior executives in more than 40 countries.

PwC in two major centers of tree contributed to the study : PwC UK and PwC Switzerland.

PwC Luxembourg did not contribute. Their name is missing in the main report and they did not publish a country report. More interesting, their website does not seem to quote the Global survey.

This raises a couple of questions :
- Does that mean that economic crime does not exist in Luxembourg? Of sure definitely no.
- how auditors that hide so a sensitive topic may be reliable? Does that mean that they never face economic crimes in the framework of their assignments? Of sure definitely no.

Once more this is perfect illustration that in Luxembourg issues are either hidden or denied. Including by the leader.

This is not serious.


Switzerland

The United Kingdom

The websites of bankers associations in the financial centres show that the Big Four are often members of these associations (Cf. British Bankers Association , Swiss Bankers Associations, and Luxembourg Bankers Associations)
This membership may be a problem for the independence because Big Four are the auditors and banks are the auditees.
The risk for the independence and the reputation depends on values that are shared and stated in the framework of the associations.

As far as the British Bankers Association is concerned it is involved in the FATF works (BBA response to FATF consultation paper on the review of the FATF 40 recommendations , Proposed Amendments to the Money Laundering Regulations 2001 . The wording of the contributions demonstrates a responsibility of professionals in this center.

As far as the Swiss Bankers Association is concerned, it does not seem involved in the FATF works and wants to minimize requirements for professionals.


As far as the Luxembourg Bankers Association is concerned it is not involved in the FATF works. Above all the ABBL standardized accounting frauds by stating that “offences such as forgery, use of forgery, false balance sheets, use of false balance sheets or unauthorised use of corporate property should not be included. These are offences with financial connotations which are confused with laundering for the sole purpose of applying exceptional powers to these vague offences.” (See Report 2003)
Auditors in Luxembourg should have disapproved of the wording, which involves every member of the ABBL, and especially them. The consequence is that after cases like Enron, Parmalat, and Worldcom... there are some auditors that standardize accounting offences through their membership in business networks, and are therefore much more on auditees' side than on the controlling side.