2023-06-02 09:27:00
With 166,961 reports of suspicion of illegal financial activities received, the activity of Tracfin, the financial intelligence unit of the Ministry of the Economy, jumped by +46% in 2022 compared to 2020, the year of comparison. This is what emerges from the annual report published this Friday, June 2 by this service responsible for combating clandestine financial circuits, money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
The information received by the service comes from the declarations that certain professionals subject to the obligation must declare to it or from information transmitted by the partner administrations and the foreign financial intelligence units. On the other hand, Tracfin is not ” authorized to receive and process information transmitted by individuals”.
Ever-increasing claims
In detail, out of all the declarations received, the vast majority (162,708) were sent by declaring professions bound by transparency, such as banking-insurance companies, real estate intermediaries, notaries or sports agents. .
The rest of the information received comes from various public bodies (2,327) or foreign financial intelligence units (1,845), the service detailed.
Most of the reports received (93.5%) come from the financial sector, especially banks and credit institutions, mainly in the Ile-de-France region, which concentrates significant economic activity.
As the director of Tracfin explained in an interview with La Tribune last summer, “Certain events such as the Covid crisis and fraud in economic support schemes or the war between Russia and Ukraine have contributed to the increased demand for our services”. The number of information received has thus been multiplied by two between 2017 and 2021, indicated Guillaume Valette-Valla.
126 declarations on Russian assets
Tracfin is also engaged in tracking the assets of Russian oligarchs as part of European sanctions once morest Moscow since the invasion of Ukraine. The cell welcomed in its report “the responsiveness of reporting professions” who transmitted 126 suspicious transaction reports last year “relating to the risk of financing combatants and their identification in combat zones”.
“Our job is to check that there is no risk of circumvention. When the assets are frozen, we try to check whether people do not try to circumvent the measures through family relays, relatives or tax optimization mechanisms. specified Guillaume Valette-Valla.
This summer, Tracfin will publish its “Trends and risk analyses” report presenting recurring and emerging typologies in terms of money laundering and terrorist financing.
The Ministry of the Economy wants to increase the tax burden on the richest
In this dynamic of control and sanctioning of illegal financial activities, the government intends to beef up its fight once morest tax evasion over the next four years. After Elisabeth Borne’s announcements on “the hundred days”, the Minister of Public Accounts Gabriel Attal rolled out a range of measures on Tuesday May 9 intended to strengthen controls once morest the biggest fraudsters.
“Every fraud is serious, but that of the most powerful is unforgivable. My philosophy is to focus on them and ease the pressure on the middle classes,” declared the Minister Delegate for Public Accounts in an interview with the newspaper The world. To achieve this, the Budget Minister promised more “means, more sanctions, and more results. By the end of the five-year period, tax audits on the largest estates will increase by 25%. And the hundred largest market capitalizations will now be subject to a tax audit every two years”.
(With AFP)
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