IslamabadPakistan is likely to remain on the FATF gray list till June 2022 for failing to meet certain targets set under the additional category related to money laundering and terror financing. This has been said in a media report published on Friday.
The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is a global organization monitoring money laundering and terrorist financing. Pakistan has been on the gray list of FATF since June 2018 for failing to curb money laundering and terror financing. It was given an action plan to meet the set targets by October 2019. According to ‘The Dawn’, the concluding session of the supplementary meeting of the FATF is to be held on Friday and its agenda includes review of Pakistan’s progress.
According to the newspaper, Pakistan is now working on the target of completing the 2021 action plan to combat money laundering and terrorist financing by the end of January 2023. In October 2021, the FATF acknowledged Pakistan’s progress on 26 points of its 27-point action plan, but asked Islamabad to investigate and prosecute terror funding against top cadres of terror groups banned by the United Nations (UN). was retained in its gray list (highly monitored list). FATF President Marcus Player said at the time that Pakistan had to complete two concurrent action plans with a total of 34 sources.
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According to the report published in ‘The Dawn’, Pakistan has either completed or made progress on 30 sources. It said that the recent Action Plan for 2021 received from the Asia Pacific Group (APG), a regional partner of the FATF, mainly focused on money laundering and found serious loopholes in its implementation. The report claimed that out of the seven sources of the new action plan, four have either been completed or progress has been made.
It said that in October 2021, the FATF encouraged Pakistan to continue efforts to address the remaining points of its action plan as early as possible, stating that terror financing investigations and prosecutions of top terrorist commanders banned by the UN makes a target. Pakistan has so far avoided joining the FATF blacklist with the help of close allies such as China, Turkey and Malaysia.
However, staying on the gray list is making it difficult for Islamabad to access funding from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the European Union, adding to the country’s economic problems. have been (agency)