Despite significant progress in the adoption of laws to fight money laundering and the financing of terrorism, enforcers needed to demonstrate more success, a Council of Europe report said on Friday.

Law enforcers had yet to show they were being successful in asset recovery and achieving significant convictions in major cases.

The Moneyval report reviewed the third round of mutual evaluations conducted between 2005 and 2009 by the Council of Europe’s Committee of Experts on the Evaluation of Anti-Money Laundering Measures and the Financing of Terrorism.

Malta is among the 28 Council of Europe member states and non-member Israel which are currently evaluated by Moneyval, an associate member of the Financial Action Task Force.

The document identified common themes arising from the evaluations, major areas of weakness and highlights issues that still need to be addressed. Pending issues are being followed up in Moneyval’s ongoing fourth round of assessment visits.

It concluded that while all countries have achieved money laundering convictions, there was still a need to create and entrench a culture which proactively went after criminal proceeds.

The report stressed more significant results by law enforcement were needed to better support and complement the considerable effort and resources the private sector, the financial intelligence units, and supervisory authorities were applying to the implementation of preventive measures.

During its third round of evaluations Moneyval countries made significant progress on preventive measures.

Compliance with standards by the banks and the financial sector was much stronger than in the non-financial sector, particularly the designated categories of businesses and professionals where compliance and anti-money laundering and terrorism finance countering supervision needed enhancing.