The Council, which is composed of government ministers from each EU member country, agreed on a revised text of changes to the EU’s Anti-Money-Laundering Directive (AMLD), which will now return to the Parliament for a second reading and negotiations with the Council on final wording. The Council text retains the requirement, which the European Parliament overwhelmingly approved in March, that companies and trusts formed in every EU country disclose their “beneficial owners,” or the natural persons who ultimately own or control them, to a central authority.

“We strongly praise the Council for its movement to crack down on anonymous companies,” said GFI President Raymond Baker, a longtime authority on financial crime. “As our research notes, nearly $70 billion flowed illegally into or out of emerging EU economies in 2011. Anonymous companies are the number one tool for laundering the proceeds of crime, corruption, and tax evasion. Creating registries of the true, human, ‘beneficial’ owner of each company—as the Council endorsed today—is a common sense approach to curbing financial crime and the tremendous flow of illegal money.”

The move follows the United Kingdom’s declaration in April that the UK will create a public registry of the beneficial owners of all companies registered in the UK. Although the Council text does not require that every EU member country establish public registries, it does not bar any country from doing so.