The Asia Pacific Group (APG) on Money Laundering has improved Pakistan’s rating on 21 of the 40 technical recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) against money laundering and terror financing, but retained it on ‘Enhanced Follow-up’ for sufficient outstanding requirements, according to a Dawn report.

The second Follow-Up Report (FUR) on Mutual Evaluation of Pakistan released by the APG — a regional affiliate of the Paris-based FATF — also downgraded the country on one criterion. The report said Pakistan was re-rated to ‘compliant’ status on five counts and on 15 others to ‘largely compliant’ and on yet another count to ‘partially compliant'.

Overall, Pakistan is now fully ‘compliant’ with seven recommendations and ‘largely compliant’ with 24 others. The country is ‘partially compliant’ with seven recommendations and ‘non-compliant’ with two out of a total of 40 recommendations. All in all, Pakistan is now compliant or largely compliant with 31 out of 40 FATF recommendations.

“Pakistan will move from enhanced (expedited) to enhanced follow-up, and will continue to report back to the APG on progress to strengthen its implementation of anti-money laundering and combating financing terror (AML/CFT) measures,” the APG said.

Pakistan submitted its third progress report in February 2021 and is yet to be evaluated.

“Overall, Pakistan has made notable progress in addressing the technical compliance deficiencies identified in its Mutual Evaluation Report (MER) and has been re-rated on 22 recommendations,” the APG added.

In the first FUR of February last year, Pakistan’s progress was largely found unchanged — non-compliant on four counts, partially compliant on 25 counts and largely compliant on nine recommendations. Since then, the government has worked aggressively and improved its effectiveness on AML/CFT system.

The finance ministry and Minister for Energy Hammad Azhar, who is also head of the task force on FATF, separately welcomed the re-rating, saying the results proved the sincerity along with the resolve of the government in complying with the FATF requirements.
(SAM)