Thursday November 12, 06:20 AM

EU mulls U.S. access to Europeans' bank data -paper

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - The European Union may grant U.S. anti-terror investigators broad access to Europeans' cross-border and domestic bank transfer data, a German newspaper reported on Wednesday.

The Financial Times Deutschland cited a draft agreement with Washington drawn up by Sweden, which currently holds the rotating six-month presidency of the EU, for the story.

The paper said the agreement would run for one year, to January 2011, and that the Swedish presidency wanted EU governments to sign off on the deal before Dec. 1, when an EU treaty comes into force that will give the European Union parliament more say in the bloc's justice and internal affairs.

U.S. anti-terror authorities would have to justify their demand for information with the U.S. Treasury and focus their request as narrowly as possible, the paper quoted the draft agreement as saying, but in cases where the request was not precise, "all relevant" data should be made available.

This would include name, address, account and personal identification numbers, the paper said.

The paper also quoted diplomats as saying that Germany, France, Finland and Austria had expressed doubts about the proposed agreement with the United States.

(Reporting by Jonathan Gould; Editing by Gary Hill)