Chile’s Ministry of Finance published an update after the Senate completed its article-by-article vote on 25 March on a bill to create a Subsystem of Economic Intelligence and introduce prevention and early-warning measures linked to organised crime, and sent it to the Chamber of Deputies for the second stage of the legislative process. The initiative is framed as a tool to better trace and prosecute the money trail associated with money laundering, terrorist financing and other crimes linked to organised crime. The bill strengthens the economic intelligence and analysis framework by reinforcing the Financial Analysis Unit (Unidad de Análisis Financiero, UAF) and creating intelligence units in the Internal Revenue Service (SII) and Customs, alongside provisions intended to speed up the search, collection, analysis, storage and exchange of data related to specified economic crimes, drug trafficking and terrorist practices. It also sets a single statute for subsystem officials covering confidentiality obligations, asset and interests declarations, drug-use controls and incompatibilities, and expands the UAF’s remit to include preventing the use of the financial system and other economic sectors for organised crime. On access to bank information, the Senate rejected a proposal that would have introduced three administrative exceptions to bank-secrecy rules (with a prior suspicious transaction report, ROS), leaving in place the current requirement for prior authorisation from a minister of the Santiago Court of Appeals, to be decided without third-party participation within three days. The bill now proceeds to consideration by the Chamber of Deputies; the Finance Ministry indicated it is seeking enactment during the first half of the year.

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