Draft Law of Ukraine

"On Amendment of Some Legislative Acts of Ukraine Related to Legalization (Laundering) of Illegal Incomes and Financing of Terrorism"

The draft is called for by the necessity to introduce into the Ukrainian legislation a new wording of the 40 FATF recommendations, which was approved in June 2003 at the FATF Session in Berlin.

According to the draft, the Law of Ukraine "On Prevention and Fighting Legalization (Laundering) of Illegal Incomes" is to be added with a provision related to expanding the list of subjects of primary financial monitoring at the expense of representatives of non-financial occupation and profession (real estate agents, lawyers, notaries, accountants, precious stone and precious metals traders).

The draft enforces requirements to operations with clients for maximum full collection of information on them, their activity, participants, heads and persons obtaining proceeds from the client’s activity. However, special attention shall be paid to transactions of non-resident banks, as well as political figure and persons related thereto.

The draft also establishes the duty of subjects of primary financial monitoring to suspend financial transactions for two working days, if its participant or the person obtaining proceeds is a person included into the lists of persons related to performance of terrorist activity and on the same day to report on that to a respective body.

Thus, amendments suggested by the draft will lead to considerable enforcement of fight against legalization (laundering) of illegal incomes and financing of terrorism. At the same time approval of the draft will permit Ukraine to bring its normative acts to conformity with the 40 FATF amendments, which in its turn will contribute to removing Ukraine from FATF black list.