Noting that Pakistan’s measures against money laundering and terror financing “are not yet sufficient to justify a re-rating”, a regional affiliate of the Financial Action Task Force on Monday retained the country on its “Enhanced Follow-up” list, according to a media report.
The development came only a few weeks ahead of the meeting of the FATF — the Paris-based global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog — to decide on Pakistan’s grey list status.
The first Follow-Up Report on Mutual Evaluation of Pakistan released by the Asia-Pacific Group (APG) underlined that the country’s progress on the 40 FATF recommendations on the effectiveness of anti-money laundering and combating financing terror (AML/CFT) system largely remained unchanged — non-compliant on four counts, partially compliant on 25 counts and largely compliant on nine recommendations, the Dawn News reported.
Pakistan has improved its full compliance on only two of the 40 FATF recommendations, the APG report noted.
Enhanced follow up
Pakistan will remain in enhanced (expedited) follow up and will continue to report back to the APG on progress to strengthen its implementation of AML/CFT measures, the APG concluded in its 12-page report.
Pakistan had requested for re-ratings on three areas declared partially compliant by the APG in October last year. The request was accepted on one count and rejected on two due to ‘insufficient’ progress to the satisfaction of international experts.
The 41-member APG in August last year had downgraded Pakistan’s status to “Enhanced Follow-up” category from “Regular Follow-up” over technical deficiencies to meet normal international financial standards by October 2018.
