FATF keeps Pakistan on its 'Grey List', adds Turkey, Jordan, Mali

Mauritius and Botswana were removed from the list during the plenary

Pakistan will remain on the 'Grey List' of the Financial Action Task Force, as its government led by Imran Khan could not yet fully meet the intergovernmental organisation's expectations on probing and stopping flow of funds to terrorist organisations.

The FATF, which had its plenary in Paris from Monday to Thursday, decided that Pakistan would continue to remain on its Grey List at least till April 2022 as the Khan government would have to do more to convince the intergovernmental organisation that investigations by its agencies into cases of terror financing were targeting the top leaders of the outfits that the United Nations designated as terrorist organisations and imposed sanctions on.

Marcus Pleyer, the president of the FATF, said that the Pakistan government had made progress in implementing 30 of the 34 measures prescribed to it since 2018 by the intergovernmental organisation set up to coordinate global efforts to check flow of funds to terrorist organisations and money laundering.

The FATF also decided to put Turkey, Jordan and Mali on its 'Grey List', officially a list of “jurisdictions with strategic deficiencies in its legal regime to check money laundering and terrorist financing”. Mauritius and Botswana were removed from the Grey List.

Pakistan is now expected to be taken off the 'Grey List' of the FATF, if and when it would be able to demonstrate that investigations by its law-enforcing agencies into alleged cases of financing terror and prosecutions indeed targetted senior leaders and commanders of the terrorist groups the United Nations Security Council placed under curbs, like Masood Azhar, Zaki ur Rahman Lakhvi and Dawood Ibrahim.

The progress made by the Pakistan government will come under review when the FATF would hold the next plenary in April 2022.

Pleyer said that the FATF remained concern about the “current evolving money laundering and terrorist financing risk environment in Afghanistan”. “We affirm recent UN Security Council resolutions on situation Afghanistan. We demand that country not be used to plan or finance terrorist acts,” he told journalists after the four-day plenary concluded on Thursday.

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