Communiqué

Risk assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing (ML/TF)

The Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) would like to inform the professionals subject to its supervision that they can now view the complete version of the national risk assessment of money laundering and terrorist financing of Luxembourg (NRA).

In accordance with Recommendation 1 of the FATF, countries must identify, assess and understand their money laundering and terrorist financing risks and adopt a risk-based approach to mitigate the identified risks. As a reminder, a summary report of the national risk assessment (20 pages) was published by the Ministry of Finance in December 2018 (https://mfin.gouvernement.lu/en/publications/Divers/NRA/NRA.html).

Please note that the complete report in English (307 pages) is now available for professionals in order to help them implement their own risk assessment in accordance with Article 2-2 of the Law of 12 November 2004 on the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing, as amended.

This document reflects the situation as at 31 December 2017 and does not take into account the legislative, regulatory and procedural amendments adopted afterwards.

We would like to remind you that this document is confidential and intended primarily for dirigeants, persons in charge of compliance/control in relation to the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing (e.g. chief compliance officers) and persons in charge of risks (chief risk officers).

Interested professionals are invited to contact the CSSF by email to nra@cssf.lu by specifying

(1) the name of the entity on behalf of which the request is made;

(2) the name of the recipient (please, indicate only one person per entity);

(3) the function of the recipient;

(4) the professional email address of the recipient; and

(5) the commitment of the recipient to comply with the confidentiality clause below:

The recipient of the document commits, on the one hand, not to disclose or communicate to anybody except to the persons responsible of his/her entity in Luxembourg all or part of the non-public version of the national risk assessment, received in the framework of his/her function as dirigeant, person in charge of compliance/control in relation to the fight against money laundering and terrorist financing or person in charge of risks and, on the other hand, to take all necessary steps to preserve this confidentiality within his entity in Luxembourg. S/he commits to communicate the document and information therein only to the members of his/her entity in Luxembourg who must have knowledge thereof in the framework of their functions, provided that they are subject to an equivalent confidentiality obligation.

After the validation of your request, the CSSF will communicate the email address of the recipient to the Executive Secretariat of the Committee for the prevention of money laundering and terrorist financing (Ministry of Justice), which will send you a link in order to download the document from a secured server.

Following the conclusions per type of sector of the NRA, the CSSF, as the AML/CFT supervisory authority, will publish risk assessment reports concerning some sub-sectors due to the high inherent risk noted in the NRA.

Thus, two reports will be published before the year-end, one on the risk present in the sub-sector of private banking and one on the risk present in the sub-sector of collective investment. A third report will follow at the beginning of 2020 regarding the risks of some specialised professionals of the financial sector, among which for example, corporate domiciliation agents.

Another topic which will be examined in 2020 will be the risks present in payment institutions and electronic money institutions, particularly if they use agents.