Pakistan has been retained in the global anti-money laundering watchdog Financial Action Task Force's (FATF) Grey List and has been given four more months time to fulfil requirements and secure an exit from the list, media reports said on Friday. The Paris-based FATF has warned Islamabad that it could end up on the black list when it makes a fresh assessment in four months.
According to various media report, Pakistan has been handed over an eight-point list by FATF to get out of the Grey List. Pakistan, who returned to the FATF ‘grey list’ in June 2018, after FATF found deficiencies in Islamabad’s money laundering and anti-terror funding laws and their implementation.
Pakistan has time until June 2020 to comply to the remaining 13 points out the 27 point action plan of the FATF. The next plenary is in October.
The countries that have backed Pakistan till now include China, Turkey, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. If Pakistan fails to comply with the remaining of the action plans, it will be moved to the black list, to share space with North Korea and Iran. This would entail harsher sanctions and intense scrutiny of all financial transactions.
The FATF in October decided to keep Pakistan on its Grey List for failure to curb funnelling of funds to terror groups Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed and others.
Pakistan is already finalising major amendments to at least a dozen of its laws to meet the FATF requirements by June this year and sentenced Mumbai attack mastermind and JuD chief Hafiz Saeed to 11 years in two cases of terror financing on February 12.
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Saeed, a UN designated terrorist whom the US has placed a USD 10 million bounty on, was arrested on July 17 in the terror financing cases. The 70-year-old fiery cleric is lodged at the high-security Kot Lakhpat jail here.
Based on these steps, the country's performance would be judged in the next FATF plenary in October 2020, the report said.
Pakistan submitted a 650-page review report to the FATF on January 8. The report was submitted in response to 150 questions raised by the FATF regarding new Pakistani policies on money laundering. The report outlined the steps taken by Pakistan between October 2019 to January 2020 to implement the group's recommendations.
In January, Pakistan urged the US to support its bid to exit from FATF's grey list ahead of a key meeting of the international terror financing watchdog in Beijing in which Islamabad's efforts to adopt stricter laws against terror financing and money laundering were scrutinised.
