... be liable for the performance of the obligations arising from the Act on Counteracting Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (“Act”).

 

    The Senate accepted the amendment to the Act on Counteracting Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (hereinafter: “Amendment”) on 18 October 2019. This means that the Amendment is now waiting for the president’s signature and will start to apply in 30 days from the date of its publication in the Journal of Laws.
    According to the Amendment, a penalty of a million zlotys may be imposed not only on a member of the management board of the obliged institution that is responsible for performing the statutory obligations (as was the case to date), but also on the representatives of the management staff responsible for performing the statutory duties.
    The provisions of the amended Act will, in particular, affect the activities of groups regarding their operations in which individual companies performed tasks related to the provision of services for at least a year or if they were trained on services involving:
  • the establishment of a legal person or unincorporated organizational unit;
  • holding the post of a member of the management board or enabling another person to hold this or a similar post in a legal person or unincorporated organizational unit;
  • the provision of a registered office, address for doing business or correspondence address and other related services to a legal person or unincorporated organizational unit;
  • acting or enabling another person to act as a trustee of a trust, which arose through a legal transaction;
  • acting or enabling another person to act as a person exercising rights from stocks or shares for an entity other than a company that is listed on a regulated market, which is subject to information disclosure requirements in accordance with the law of the European Union, or which is subject to equivalent international standards.
    The lawmakers also imposed, among other things, the obligation for beneficial owners and/or people holding managerial positions in the enterprises described above, as well as in entities that intermediate in the sale of real property, to present a certificate of not having a criminal record. In the case of failing to fulfil this obligation, the people liable for this obligation may incur a fine of PLN 10,000.
    The method of legalizing the amendment is also interesting, as the initial steps of the legislation were ignored because of the urgency of the bill. The urgent procedure of law-making arises from the fact that the correctness of the implementation of the AML IV directive into the Polish legal order is the subject of proceedings being conducted by the European Commission.