*SYDEY – Pakistan has presented before the Financial Action Task Force it’simplementation Report over the issue of greylist.*
Pakistan has frozen the bank accounts and assets of banned outfits, adelegation of the Pakistani government told the Asia Pacific Group (APG) ofthe Financial Action Task Force in Sydney on Tuesday.
Based out of Paris, the FATF is an inter-governmental body that combatsmoney laundering, terrorist financing and threats to the internationalfinancial system.
It put Pakistan on its grey list in June 2017 because of deficiencies inthe country’s Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Countering of TerroristFinancing (CTF) regulations.
Pakistan and the APG, which Pakistan is a member of, began the first roundof dialogue in Sydney where government officials briefed the latter aboutactions it has taken against banned outfits involved in terrorist financing.
In the Sydney briefing, Pakistani officials told the APG that they havefrozen the accounts and assets of the Jamaat ud Dawa and its welfare wingthe Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation. Other banned outfits whose assets wereseized include the Da’ish, Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba,Jaish-e-Mohammad and Haqqani Network, according to the briefing.
Last October, an FATF delegation visited Pakistan for two weeks to assessthe country’s progress on countering money laundering and financing ofterrorism.
Read Top Stories
The FATF gave the government an action plan to exit from the grey list.Later in December, Pakistan prepared a Terrorism Financing Risk Assessmentreport, which includes drug trafficking, kidnapping for ransom, externalfunding, extortion, and robberies among primary sources of terrorismfinancing in Pakistan.
The report will be presented to the APG in the ongoing Sydney dialogue,which is an extension of that process and will end on January 10.
The APG will then present Pakistan’s case before the FATF in February.
Pakistan is among 83 countries with a risk score of 5.0 or above. These arecountries that could be loosely classified as having a significant risk ofmoney laundering and terrorist financing, according to the Basel AML Report2018, an independent annual ranking that assesses the risk of moneylaundering and terrorist financing in 129 countries.
