Pakistan Confirms FATF Will Put it on ‘Grey List’ in June

The FATF has asked Pakistan to take additional steps to curb money laundering and terror financing.

Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Faisal.

(Photo: Twitter)

After weeks of speculation, Pakistan on 28 February confirmed that the country is set to be placed on the Financial Action Task Force's terror financing watchlist in June this year.

The country's Foreign Office spokesman Dr Mohammad Faisal, during his weekly briefing, also confirmed that "Pakistan will be assigned to the 'grey list' in June, once an action plan has been mutually negotiated".

It (the FATF) has highlighted certain “deficiencies” in the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering of Terrorist Financing (AML/CFT) framework of Pakistan... We will take further actions for addressing any remaining deficiencies

Mohammad Faisal

Pakistan vowed to take further actions to address certain "deficiencies" highlighted by the FATF in its anti-money laundering and counter-terror financing framework.

At its plenary meeting in Paris last week, the 37-nation FATF placed Pakistan on a watch list of the countries where terrorist outfits are still allowed to raise funds.

Faisal said that Pakistan, over the last few years, took a number of measures to address these issues, including through enactment of legislations, issuance of regulations and guidelines to the financial sector, establishment of the Financial Monitoring Unit and implementation of UNSC 1267 sanctions on the entities of concern like Jamat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and Falah-i-Insaaniyat (FIF).

The US officials had said that JuD leader and Mumbai terrorist attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed and his "charities" were top on the list of the groups that the FATF wanted Pakistan to act against.

The statement that Pakistan will be transferred from the ‘grey’ to the ‘black’ list in June this year was not true as the FATF website clearly demarcates the countries in the ‘black’ list as those who are non-cooperative.

Mohammad Faisal

Pakistan was in touch with the US, and Lisa Curtis, Senior Director for South and Central Asia at US National Security Council visited Pakistan on February 26 and met Foreign Secretary (Tehmina Janjua), he said.

"We continue to get differing signals from different parts of the US Government... Pakistan has made immense efforts to address issues related to counter-terrorism. We continue to ask the US for actionable evidence," Faisal said.

The UK government confirmed that it would continue to allow trade concessions to Pakistan after Brexit, as is being done by the European Union, he said, adding that the annual trade between Pakistan and the UK stands at about $2.5 billion.

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