From Theresa Villiers MEP.

Sir, European Union finance ministers reached agreement this week in Brussels on new EU rules on money laundering. Existing money-laundering laws are providing serious headaches, not just for bankers, accountants and lawyers, but for their customers as well. Few of your readers will have been able to escape demands for passports, utility bills and so on just to open a bank account.

In these circumstances one would have thought Gordon Brown and his fellow finance ministers would have been clarifying and stripping back rules that have led to these unintended consequences. Not so.

Instead they have agreed a new and more detailed third money-laundering directive. Admittedly, they have removed some of the more problematic aspects of the Commission's original proposal for a new directive but they have failed to tackle the reform of existing rules that is so clearly needed.

Several of the countries that have pressed hardest for this third directive have not yet even implemented the second. Moreover, no parliament (either domestic or European) has carried out any serious scrutiny of the new rules and media coverage of this issue has appeared non-existent.

It is not acceptable for laws that have such an intrusive role in the lives of ordinary people to be nodded through behind closed doors in Brussels.

In the past, I have supported money-laundering legislation but I am fast coming to the conclusion that I was wrong and that these rules do almost nothing to catch criminals or terrorists and merely provide inconvenience to law-abiding citizens in carrying out innocuous everyday financial transactions.

Theresa Villiers, Conservative Member of the European Parliament for London, European Parliament, Brussels, Belgium