Just at the moment when the central organs of the European Union are muttering darkly about abandoning the 'whitelist culture,' some nation-states are refreshing it.

Just at the moment when the central organs of the European Union are muttering darkly about "abandoning the whitelist culture," some nation-states are refreshing it. The latest example appears to be Ireland, which has released a fresh list under s31 of its Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010. The UK, too, issued a whitelist in 2008 but not so much with legal backing as with a 'nod and wink' from HM Treasury, which signs off the Joint Money-Laundering Steering Group Guidelines which interpret the AML rules of that country.

The draft of the EU's fourth money-laundering directive contains an exhortation for EU countries to abandon anti-money-laundering (AML) whitelists, although it is very vaguely phrased and only once. This is a shy reference to the EU's egregious decision to intrude politics into crime-prevention by asking its constituent countries to treat various sleazy backwaters as having compliance regimes 'equivalent' to the EU's own. This conjured up shades of the Financial Action Task Force's discredited 'blacklist' of countries whose identities could be summed up as "everyone who displeases the Franco-German alliance or the Americans, depending upon who has the upper hand at the time."

Section 33 of the Irish statute details the measures that money-landering reporting officers (MRLOs) at private banks, fund management firms and elsewhere must take to verify customers' identities, verify the beneficial owners, and understand the 'ownership and control structures' of customers' holdings. Section 33(4) states that one of the ways in which an MLRO can verify the voracity of an individual customer's identity is (c) "on the basis of confirmation received from an acceptable institution that the customer is, or has been, a customer of that institution." The phrase 'acceptable institution' is defined in subs10 as a credit or financial institution that "is situated in a place designated under section 31 and supervised or monitored in the place for compliance with requirements  equivalent to those specified in the Third Money Laundering Directive."

Section 31, for its part, says that it is up to the minister in question to determine what countries are to go on the list of places that host "acceptable institutions" because of their "equivalence."

The list is as follows: Australia; Brazil; Canada; Hong Kong; Iceland; India; Japan; Liechtenstein; Mexico; Norway; South Korea; Singapore; Switzerland; South Africa; the United States of America; the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man; the Dutch overseas territories of Netherlands Aruba, Curacao, Sint Maarten, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba; the French overseas territories of Mayotte, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Saint Pierre and Miquelon and Wallis and Futuna.

The appearence of Russia (a kleptocracy whose bank corruption is the stuff of legend) and Mexico (a nearly-failed state riven by drug wars and untrackable money-flows) is problematic enough; but  Aruba and Curacao are famous for their money-laundering cultures and India's economy suffers from the typical middle-eastern vices of bulk cash smuggling, gold smuggling, false invoicing and hawala banking, all of which are interrelated and all of which make the informal economy and untraceable money-flows a dominant force. Alan Shatter, the minister for Justice and Equality, gave the list his imprimatur.