The European Union has promulgated a fresh list of 23 non-EU countries that it accuses of being strategically deficient in the fight against money laundering and terrorist finance.

The 23 jurisdictions are: Afghanistan; American Samoa; the Bahamas; Botswana; Ethiopia; Ghana; Guam; Iran; Iraq; Libya; Nigeria; North Korea; Pakistan; Panama; Puerto Rico; Samoa; Saudi Arabia; Sri Lanka; Syria; Trinidad and Tobago; Tunisia; US Virgin Islands; and Yemen. This will replace a list that already contains 16 countries in the space of 20 days after the publication of the relevant "delegated regulation" in the EU's Official Journal.

As a result of the listing, banks and other financial firms covered by the EU's AML rules will be required to apply EDD or "enhanced due diligence" to financial operations involving customers and financial institutions from these countries, the better to identify any suspicious money flows. This is apparently a result of the stricter demands of the governmental club's fifth anti-money laundering directive, which came into force in July. The AML directives allow the European Commission, the nearest thing that the EU has to an executive branch, to issue blacklists that EU financial firms have to observe.

Věra Jourová, the EU's commissioner for justice, consumers and gender equality, is convinced that the EU's AML laws are "the strongest anti-money laundering standards in the world," although the UK has always been ahead of its continental masters in this regard.

The 23 countries were plucked from a larger list of 54, which was made public in November. All the countries on that larger list, according to the EU, have "systemic impact on the integrity of the EU financial system," the International Monetary Fund calls them "international offshore financial centres," and they are "economically relevant" to, and have strong economic ties with, the EU. Some of the countries listed today are already on the current EU list, which includes 16 countries. The commission also proposes to remove a number of countries from its list; these are Bosnia-Herzegovina, Guyana, Laos, Uganda and Vanuatu.

Politically charged AML blacklists were discredited very early in the century when the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force, the world's AML standard-setter, abandoned its controversial list of "non-co-operative countries and territories" in the face of international opprobrium. This did not stop it from reviving the list in another form a few years later. The EU has attracted plenty of scorn for promoting suspect lists as well, notably the AML whitelist that it asked its member-states to promulgate on its behalf in 2008 which gave financial firms from Aruba, Curaçao and Russia a privileged pass as states with 'equivalent' AML controls.