Six months and two reminders after asking them to comply with their obligation to fill in an anti-money laundering questionnaire, Heinen, has publicly named all of the concerned companies asking them to adhere to the procedure.

This should avoid Luxembourg being singled out as of next November, with the visit of the Gafi evaluation team, an evaluation that had been postponed last year.

At the same time as Heinen invited professionals in the real estate sector to comply with the regulations, last August he published an educational and very accessible guide on the measures to be put in place to prevent money laundering or the financing of terrorism and a second guide, pinpointing the necessary steps.

In its last available annual report, in 2020, the Financial Intelligence Unit indicated that “while the clear increase noted between 2018 and 2019 in the number of real estate agents registered in goAML (from 13 in 2018 to 43 in 2019) was confirmed between 2019 and 2020, with a further jump from 43 to 87, the number of declarations remains very low. As at 31 December 2020, no promoters, a category of professional that only entered the list of entities subject to the 2004 Act in March 2020, were registered in goAML. There were no reports from this category either.”

Real estate agents reported six suspicious activities while property developers signalled none in 2020.

This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.