‘Pak needs legislation to meet pending FATF benchmarks’

Pakistan will have to make legislation on at least two counts to meet three pending benchmarks of the 27-point action plan of the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog FATF before the 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 the 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 on anti money laundering, finance minister Abdul Hafeez Shaikh asked the financial monitoring unit and chairman of the FATF’s coordination committee and industries minister Hammad Azhar to immediately finalise the timelines for additional legislation in consultation with agencies of the federal government and the armed forces.