Complying with the Sanctions Act

Are you a financial service provider or do you own an investment firm in the Netherlands? For example, a bank, insurance company, (money) exchange organisation, pension fund, trust office, crypto service provider, or leasing company? You must check if any national or international sanctions have been imposed on your client. For instance, because your client is a money launderer or finances terrorism. If this is the case, you must carry out this penalty. This is stated in the Sanctions Act.

The Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) and the Dutch Central Bank (De Nederlandsche Bank, DNB) monitor if you comply with the sanction regulations.

Carrying out sanctions

There are several institutions that can impose financial sanctions (penalties):

• the United Nations’ Security Council (UN) (the highest authority)
• the European Union (EU)
• individual countries

You have to carry out international sanctions. This means that if 1 of the institutions imposes a sanction on your client, you must:

• freeze the funds of the individual or organisation
• no longer supply financial means to this individual or organisation
• no longer provide them with financial services, for example taking out insurances

Checking customers against the list of sanctions

You must check if your clients are listed on:

• the European list of sanctions
• the National sanctionlist terrorism
• the UN Security Council sanctions list

You perform this check at different times. You must perform a check when an individual or organisation wishes to become your client (investigating clients). After that, you need to check regularly if your client is listed on 1 of the sanctions lists, for example when your client makes significant changes, and in case of transactions.

Is your client on 1 of these lists? Or is your client affiliated with an organisation on the list? You are not allowed to offer this client financial services. You must carry out the sanction.

You can subscribe to DNB's Dutch-language news service to receive current information on European and national sanctions (fill in the required fields, scroll down to Nieuws, tick the box Nieuwsbericht Sancties and click Aanmelden).

Report that your client is on a sanctions list

Do you have a investment firm or are you a manager of a investment institution? And is your client on 1 of the sanctions lists or will your client be listed? You must report this to the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM, in Dutch).

Are you a financial service provider, for example a bank, insurance company, or pension fund? And is your client on 1 of the sanctions lists or will you client be listed? You must report this to the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) via the Supervisory applications service (Digitaal Loket Toezicht).

Do you find out about a (proposed) transaction with a client on a sanctions list? In specific cases you must report this to the Financial Intelligence Unit - The Netherlands.

European reporting requirement for sanctions against Russia

You must also report frozen assets of Russians and Russian businesses who are new on the sanctions list within 2 weeks with the template reporting frozen assets (Format melden bevroren tegoeden sancties Rusland) to your supervising authority (AFM or DNB) (in Dutch). If you are a bank, trust office or crypto service provider, you must report to DNB every 3 months, even if you do not have any assets frozen.

Do you have new assets or reserves from the Central Bank of Russia? You must report these to your supervising authority (AFM or DNB) every 3 months with the template reporting assets of the Central Bank of Russia (Format melden tegoeden Russische Centrale Bank). You also must send the form to the European Commission by email at RELEX-SANCTIONS@ec.europa.eu.