.png "Financial Action Task Force") |
| FATF |
Will FATF Remove Pakistan from their Grey list?
Before going to the main topic let me introduce FATF to you for easy understanding.
What is the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)?
FATF was established in 1989 and its headquarter is in Paris FATF is an organization that is designed to control financial crimes, and develop strategies to prevent money laundering, terrorism funding, and other possible crimes related to the global financial system.
How does FATF work?
The economy has risen very fastly and that creates a rise in financial crimes automatically, for example, money laundering, terrorist financing, and other crimes related to the global financial system.FATF makes strategies to prevent financial crimes and reviews and checks the financial crimes prevention policies of members. They make sure to keep their strategies up to date so financial criminals can not make any way to break the policies. The last update in the policies was in 2012, they have added new recommendations to avoid new threats to the global financial system. They also added recommendations to avoid and prevent corruption.
What are the Grey and Black list of FATF?
FATF has categorized its members into two types.
The one is Blacklist and the other is Grey list.
Blacklist: The countries are included in this list that FATF considered uncooperative in combating financial crimes. For easy understanding countries that are supporting terror funding and money laundering activities are placed on the Blacklist.
Greylist: The countries which are not considered as the safe place for terror funding and other financial crimes, are added to this list. The member countries of this type are not in that condition as blacklisted countries are. Again for easy understanding Greylisted countries are safer than Blacklisted countries.
Now let's come to the main topic: will FATF remove Pakistan from their grey list?
In 2012 Pakistan was added as Greylisted country in FATF records, and it remains for three consecutive years till 2015.
After that in 2018 FATF again added Pakistan to the greylist for monitoring which is also known as the International Cooperation Review Group (ICRG).
Only because of China and Turkey's interference FATF didn't add Pakistan to Blacklist otherwise countries like USA and India wanted Pakistan as a Blacklisted country.
For again 3 years Pakistan was in the Grey list after 2018.
On Friday 27 June, 2022 FATF announce Pakistan will be still in the grey list and that they didn't take full measures to fight against money laundering, “terrorism” financing, and other financial crimes,
But hopefully, it will be removed from the grey list soon after they complete their onsite inspection which will be done before October and a formal announcement on Pakistan’s removal would follow.
It still causes fear for international investors and banks to do business with Pakistan, Pakistan said it continues to combat financial crimes to comply with tasks set by the FATF.