Pakistan remains on FATF’s grey list: Report

The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has retained Pakistan on its terrorism financing “grey list”.

The global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog FATF has retained Pakistan on its terrorism financing “grey list” and asked Islamabad to address at the earliest the remaining deficiencies in its financial system, according to a media report on Saturday.

Pakistan has been on the grey list of the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) since June 2018 for failing to check money laundering, leading to terror financing, and was given a plan of action to complete it by October 2019.

Since then, the country continues to be on that list due to its failure to comply with the FATF mandates.

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The plenary on Friday decided against existing Pakistan from the category despite the country meeting 32 out of 34 action points, the Dawn newspaper reported.

However, Pakistan’s robust progress on its global commitments to fight financial crimes was appreciated at the concluding session of its hybrid plenary meeting, which noted that Pakistan had completed 26 of the 27 action items in its 2018 action plan of the FATF and of the seven action items of the 2021 action plan of the watchdog’s Asia Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG).

The plenary noted that since June 2018 — when Pakistan made a high-level political commitment to work with the FATF and APG to strengthen its anti-money laundering/combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) regime and to address its strategic counter-terrorist financing-related deficiencies — the country’s continued political commitment had led to significant progress across a comprehensive CFT action plan, the report said.