Forty-six European states from Iceland to Russia are beefing up the fight against dirty money with a new draft treaty on terrorist financing and other financial crime, the Council of Europe's economic crime chief said on Thursday. The new treaty, which is due to clear its first hurdle toward ratification next week, will facilitate the prosecution of financial crime, make banks report suspicious activities, demand better collection of financial data and force member states to cooperate more closely in money laundering and terrorist financing cases. "The Council adopted a treaty in 1990 against money laundering, and that treaty has been ratified by all our member states, plus Australia. But the world has changed since 1990," said Gianluca Esposito, the head of the economic crime section in the Council's Crime Problems Department. He said the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks had vastly changed the world of financial crime. "We felt there was a need to update and revise the treaty and put it into the new context," he told Reuters on the sidelines of a money laundering conference in Hollywood, Florida hosted by Alert Global Media. --More 2309 Local Time 2009 GMT
