At long last, the Friday’s announcement by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in plenary meeting held in the French capital, Paris, has not only brought glad tidings for Pakistan, it has also reinforced the fact that as a responsible state the country has always worked to meet its international obligations to counter money-laundering and terror financing.
Placed on the FATF “grey-list” in 2018 for its alleged slow progress to comply with the UN Security Council’s resolutions, Pakistan was handed over an action plan to plug loopholes in its legal framework and resolve deficiencies in its anti-money laundering law to combat financial transactions of shady origins and choke financial lifeline of terror networks.
Legally, when a country is placed under a jurisdiction under the increased monitoring by FATF, it means certain restrictions have been applied to that particular country with regard to its financial transactions on the international level and that the country has committed to move swiftly about resolving the identified deficiencies in a mutually-agreed timeframe. This jurisdiction under increased monitoring by the FATF is commonly called the “grey list”.
An FATF handout issued to the effect after the two-day plenary meeting has stated that it welcomed Pakistan’s “significant progress” in improving its anti-money laundering and combating financing terror regime.
The FATF announcement testifies that Pakistan has effectively strengthened its legal safeguards on its anti-money laundering and combating financing terror (AML/CFT) regime and fully addressed all the identified technical deficiencies to meet the commitments of its action plans that the FATF identified in June 2018 and June 2021. The handout reads that the latter set of commitments was completed in advance of the deadlines, encompassing 34 action items in total.
The exit from the “grey list” of the 37-member strong FATA would surely release Pakistan from the financial chokehold of the international agencies and the expatriate Pakistanis and the country’s financial institutes should heave a sigh of relief to be able to make a hitch-free transaction in foreign exchange and send in remittances to their motherland through legal ways and means.
In the FATF handout, its chief Raja Kumar has noted that Pakistan had been on the grey list since 2018 and that it had two concurrent action plans, which have been largely addressed by the Pakistan government.
Although the FATF has recognized Pakistan’s struggles where it has reached a point in its financial discipline to have a favorable decision from the international organization, it has also increased manifold its responsibilities to sustain the position and put in place a strong legal mechanism to the satisfaction of the international community to choke financial lifeline of terror networks and thereby root out terrorism.
