"(*eriminal activity' means any kind of criminal involvement in the commission of the following seri- 
ous crimes:) all offences, including tax crimes relating to direct taxes and indirect taxes and as defined 
in the national law of the Member States, which are punishable by deprivation of liberty or a detention 
order for a maximum of more than one year or, as regards Member States that have a minimum 
threshold for offences in their legal system, all offences punishable by deprivation of liberty or a de- 
tention order for a minimum of more than six months". It 1s evident that some Member States of the 
EEA do not punish tax evasion with deprivation of liberty as described above, but with shorter terms 
of depravation of liberty or fines, hence these Member States will not automatically have tax evasion 
as predicate offence to money laundering, but only tax fraud, if not any of both. This will be elabo- 
rated more in detail later on in chapter 2.2. 
It would have made it clearer to every member state of the EU if the AMLD would have added tax 
crimes as predicate offences to ML in a separate statutory provision, e.g. a new Art. 3 point (4) (f) 
with as simple a wording as: 
"(f) tax crimes;" 
Thus leaving the catch all provision unchanged as new Art. 3 point (4) (g) AMLD: 
“(g) all offences, which are punishable by deprivation of liberty or a detention order for a maximum of 
more than one year or, as regards Member States that have a minimum threshold for offences in their 
legal system, all offences punishable by deprivation of liberty or a detention order for a minimum of 
more than six months". 
As a conclusion, in the 4h AMLD, the EU is not much clearer than the FATF. 
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