REPORT: PAK NEEDS LAW TO MEET 3 FATF BENCHMARKS
Islamabad, March 2: Pakistan will have to make further legislation on at least two counts to meet three outstanding benchmarks of the 27point action plan of the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog FATF before the new June deadline, a media report said on Tuesday.
The Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF) placed Pakistan on the grey list in June
2018 and asked Islamabad to implement a plan of action to curb money laundering and terror financing by the end of 2019 but the deadline was extended later on due to Covid-19 pandemic. The new deadline was set by the FATF last month.
Pakistan has been scrambling in recent months to avoid being added to a list of countries deemed non-compliant with anti-money laundering and terrorist financing regulations by the FATF, a measure that officials here fear could further hurt its ailing economy.
The Dawn newspaper reported that the government will have to submit an updated report within a month to the FATF on the progress on legislation and other steps to be taken to address the outstanding concerns.
Since the government had changed almost three dozen laws over the past year to meet the FATF requirements, there should not be any hurdle in the way of making two more amendments, the report said.
Presiding over a meeting of the National Executive Committee (NEC) on Anti-Money Laundering, Finance Minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh asked the Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU) and chairman of the FATF Coordination Committee and Industries and Production Minister Hammad Azhar to immediately finalise the timelines for additional legislation in consultation with agencies of the federal government and the armed forces.
The deadlines should be reasonable to be shared with the FATF and all agencies and stakeholders should act in close coordination to meet the deadlines well in advance, the report said. It was observed that Pakistan had made progress over the past two years and was being appreciated by the international community, but at the same time it did not send a good message when international commitments and deadlines were missed repeatedly, it said. The NEC was informed that Pakistan had to update the Parisbased global watchdog on financial crimes on the way forward and its timelines on the basis of observations of FATF plenary and shortcomings pointed out by the FATF assessors.