   the nationality of the offender, his / her habitual residence, and the place of establishment of a legal person for whose benefit the offence is committed. Regarding exchange of information, Article 13(1) requires Member States to ensure that they have operational national points of contact available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, so that they can reply to any urgent foreign request within 8 hours. Furthermore, Member States must take the necessary measures to facilitate the reporting of the offences mentioned above to the competent national authorities (Article 13(3)) and to collect and share a minimum amount of statistical data on these offences (Article 14). 1.2 Purpose and methodology of the report Article 16 of the Directive requires Member States to bring into force the laws, regulations and administrative provisions necessary to comply with the Directive by 4 September 2015 and communicate them to the Commission. This report responds to the requirement under Article 17 of the Directive for the Commission to report to the European Parliament and the Council, assessing the extent to which the Member States have taken the necessary measures in order to comply with the Directive. The aim of the report is therefore to provide a concise yet informative overview of the main transposition measures taken by Member States. Member State transposition involved collecting information on the relevant legislation and administrative measures, analysing it, drafting new legislation or — in most cases — amending existing acts, seeing it through to adoption and finally reporting it to the Commission. By the transposition date, 22 Member States had notified the Commission that they had fully completed the Directive's transposition. In November 2015, the Commission opened infringement procedures for non-communication of national transposition measures against the remaining 5 Member States: BE, BG, EL, IE and SI5. As of 31 May 2017, infringement procedures for non-communication of national transposition measures against BE, BG and IE were still pending.6 The description and analysis in this report are based on the information that Member States provided by 31 May 2017.7 Notifications received after that date have not been taken into account. All notified measures referring to national legislations were taken into account as well as court decisions and – where appropriate – common legal theory. Furthermore, during the course of the analysis, the Commission contacted Member States directly where it was 5 6 7 Member States in this document are abbreviated according to: http://publications.europa.eu/code/en/en5000600.htm. Information on the Commission's decisions on infringement procedures can be found at: http://ec.europa.eu/atwork/applying-eu-law/infringementsproceedings/infringement_decisions/?lang_code=en. IE reported full transposition of the Directive on 31 May 2017. 5

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