The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority published Consultation Paper CP26/5 in January 2026, with a March 20, 2026 feedback deadline, proposing alignment of listed issuers’ sustainability disclosures with international standards.
For Money Laundering Reporting Officers, the convergence of ESG and AML obligations is no longer theoretical — regulators across the UK, EU, Netherlands, and Australia are treating inaccurate ESG disclosures as potential financial crime predicate conduct, capable of triggering fraud, misrepresentation, and AML investigations.
In the EU, Germany’s financial regulator BaFin has imposed a significant penalty on an asset manager for alleged greenwashing, while France’s financial markets regulator has repeatedly identified misleading sustainability communications as an enforcement priority, having completed over 25 environmental deferred prosecution agreements since 2020.
For compliance teams, this means ESG risk must be incorporated into client onboarding, ongoing monitoring, and product governance frameworks — not managed separately by sustainability functions. Adverse media screening should now include environmental and governance misconduct signals. Meanwhile, the EU Omnibus simplification has reduced the formal CSRD reporting scope for many mid-sized firms, but ESG litigation and enforcement risks remain elevated across jurisdictions, particularly around greenwashing claims and supply chain due diligence failures.
By FCCT Editorial Team
, an independent military force, and allied militias in Sudan raped several dozen women and girls in West Darfur’s capital, El Geneina, and those fleeing to Chad between late April and late June 2023, Human Rights Watch said today. The assailants appear to have targeted people because of their Massalit ethnicity and, in some cases, because they were known activists.){kind=link}