Pakistan likely to remain in FATF grey list

Ahead of next week’s Paris meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a Netherlands-based think-tank has said that despite the scathing indictment by the Asia Pacific Group (APG), Pakistan is likely to remain on FATF’s grey list.

The European Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS) has said that “there is little doubt that Pakistan is not really serious about its adherence to the FATF’s requirements. The country has been allowed to get away so often with blatantly untruthful claims to the international community about having stopped sponsoring terrorism that it has honed this skill into an art. It is, accordingly, attempting to project superfluous and temporary actions as demonstrations of sincere and substantial efforts to the FATF”.

“While Pakistan may well succeed in averting the FATF blacklist by the skin of its teeth this time around, it will almost certainly remain on the grey list as it has little chance of securing the 15 votes required to get itself out of the list.

“Eventually though, if Pakistan continues on its merry path of supporting terrorism and funding it through its fake currency factories and networks, the noose is bound to tighten,” the EFSAS said.

The think-tank added that Pakistani officials apprised the APG of the “measures they claimed to have taken to prevent suspicious transactions and to restrict illegal activities and freeze the assets of proscribed organisations and groups.

That they had little success in convincing the APG was evident from the scathing criticism that Pakistan came in for in the Mutual Evaluation Report (MER) that the APG released on 2 October”.