VOGEL, B. / KOSTA, E. / LASSALLE, M.
For several decades, banks and other financial service providers have been required to monitor the activities of their customers in order to detect and prevent crime. This delegated law enforcement has yielded some success, but its practical limits have become glaringly apparent, as the private sector is struggling to effectively perform this task. There is, therefore, growing international consensus that closer publicprivate cooperation is needed. This will require government authorities to share relevant information with the private sector on a regular basis, to facilitate the detection of criminal abuse of financial services.
However, such cooperation raises profound fundamental rights concerns, because it can put the separation between the public and private spheresa central paradigm of the rule of lawinto question. A pioneering work in a subject that remains largely unaddressed by law and academic debate, the present study brings together the findings of an EU-funded project that developed recommendations for a legal framework for publicprivate information sharing to prevent, detect and investigate financial crime.
To this end, the book explores the foundations of publicprivate cooperation against financial crime by adopting a pan-European and interdisciplinary approach. It brings together a comparative analysis of publicprivate cooperation in criminal procedure law and anti-money laundering law in France, Germany, Italy and Spain; an analysis of the practical design and law of innovative information-sharing mechanisms in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom; an in-depth study of the relevant EU data protection framework; an inquiry into the impact of automated methods of data processing on the applicable legal requirements; an analysis of financial information sharing between the EU and the USA; and a socio-legal study of the practical challenges encountered in publicprivate cooperation.
