ISLAMABAD: A nine-member team of the Asia-Pacific Group (APG) on Thursday recommended various actions to help Pakistan get delisted from Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) grey list of countries from September 2018.
The APG delegation which is on an 11-day visit to Pakistan has proposed measures in its report after on-site evaluation of existing legal and institutional framework to control terror financing and money laundering in Pakistan reports Dawn.
The APG team’s first on-site evaluation of Pakistan was its devotion with the Paris-based FATF and a source aware of the meeting shared that the report called ‘Exit Report’ will officially be presented to the government on Friday.
As per the source, the report will be deliberated upon during a meeting due to be attended by senior officials of all leading government departments and agencies, mainly the Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU), Federal Board of Revenue (FBR), Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) and Anti-Narcotics force to answer queries raised in the exit report.
The ‘exit report’ from the APG includes 40 suggestions which have been separated into 11 outcomes performance benchmarks.
The source told that Pakistan is in conformity with over 50% of the recommendations. But the source shared it wasn’t clear whether it would be enough for Pakistan to come out of the grey list.
In the present meetings held during the APG delegations visit, officials from the assessment team and agency officials have exhaustively deliberated with Pakistani officials regarding Islamabad’s compliance with international AML/CFT measures, draft of the technical compliance annexure forward on October 5th, Pakistan’s answers to these measures and commitment on how it intends to meet the core issue of the immediate outcomes.
Moreover, the source said it had been underlined in the previous meetings that Pakistan was mostly in conformity in regard to legislation of various laws for AML/CFT, but most issues were linked to its enactment.
The source added, the laws were in existence but there were problems related to structural arrangements for the effective enactment of these laws.
