Chile's Ministry of Finance reported that the Senate Finance Committee approved a draft law to create a Subsystem of Economic Intelligence and introduce prevention and early-warning measures against activities linked to organized crime, aimed at strengthening the tracing of illicit money flows from money laundering, terrorism financing and related offences. The package would broaden the Financial Analysis Unit’s remit to organized crime, create intelligence units within the Internal Revenue Service and Customs, and speed up the collection, analysis, storage and sharing of economic data linked to specified crimes. Agreed amendments would define “organized crime” for the purposes of the Financial Analysis Unit’s enabling law and keep judicial authorisation as the general rule for lifting bank secrecy, while adding three administrative exceptions where a suspicious transaction report exists: where the report was filed by a bank, where it concerns a public official, and where it concerns a legal entity. The Financial Analysis Unit would also be able to seek a single court order covering multiple related persons, and would have to publish each March aggregated statistics on how often it used the direct-access power, how many persons were affected and the legal basis, as well as how many persons’ banking data were included in reports sent to the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Separately, the committee approved a provision allowing biometrically registered immigrants without criminal records to apply to open and contract financial products and services within 12 months of the law’s publication. The bill now moves to a vote in the Senate chamber before proceeding to its second legislative reading in the Chamber of Deputies and Deputies under an immediate-urgency timetable.

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