The official site of Italy's central bank

Legal framework

At international level, the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Financing, approved in December 1999, extended the instruments used in the fight against money laundering to the fight against the financing of international terrorism.

In October 2001 the FATF, expanding its mandate to include the countering of terrorist financing, issued its eight Special Recommendations (a ninth was added subsequently).

The international rules and guidelines were incorporated into a number of domestic measures, whose provisions were gathered together and systematized in Legislative Decree 109/2007 transposing Directive 2005/60/EC.

Legislative Decree 109/2007 requires the entities to which it applies to:

• freeze the funds and economic resources of persons designated in EU regulations;
• communicate the freezing measures applied to the UIF and also to the NSPV of the Finance Police when economic resources are concerned;
• report to the UIF as being suspicious: the transactions, relationships and all other information concerning the persons mentioned in the lists circulated by the UIF;
• report suspicious transactions that, on the basis of available information, are directly or indirectly connected with terrorist financing.

The UIF facilitates circulation of the lists of persons designated by the European Union, for the purposes of freezings, or by other institutions and organizations involved in combating international terrorism (for example, the judicial authorities or the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control), for the purposes of reporting requirements.

As indicated in the opinion released by the Italian Foreign Exchange Office on 16 January 2002, the obligations described above stem from the correspondence between the ID data of the subjects indicated in the lists and those of the persons involved in the transactions and relationships analyzed by the entities subject to reporting requirements.