ISLAMABAD: Minister for Energy Hammad Azhar Wednesday said that Pakistan was close to completing the action plans given by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to ensure compliance in line with its standards.
“Two of the toughest action plans were given to Pakistan and we showed excellent performance in a short span of time; now we are near to completing both tasks,” he said while addressing the participants of first Assessors’ Course here at the National FATF Secretariat.
Azhar, who is also chairman of Pakistan’s Anti-Money Laundering (AML)/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) group, said that Pakistan was playing a key role in the global fight against terrorism, its financing, and also money-laundering.
He said Pakistan had learned a lot from the challenge of being on the grey list and had converted it into an opportunity to improve the existing system. “The assessors’ course is part of our learning as we want Pakistan to have the local capacity to assess public and private institutions dealing with financial flows.”
Through this course, the minister vowed that Pakistan would continue with improvement processes for regional and world safety even after completing the FATF’s action plans.
He expressed confidence that Pakistan’s assessors, after getting training, would not only be able to represent the country at an international level but also provide services to other countries.
“The course is a good development which shows Pakistan’s increasing compliance and commitment towards the FATF. Pakistan’s system is much more compliant to FATF as compared to most countries present on the platform. Our enforcement measures are far effective than them,” he said.
With these measures, Azhar said, Pakistan’s future generations would benefit due to the lasting peace in the region and world. “It will help check menaces like money-laundering through which billions of dollars of poor countries are illegally shifted to other countries every year,” he added.
FATF Secretariat Director General (DG) National, Khawaja Adnan Zahir, in his welcome address to the concluding session of the first 9-day Assessors Course, highlighted the importance of the training for law enforcement agencies and other departments, keeping in view the massive challenges the country has faced over the last three years.
During the past decade, he said, the global AML/CFT landscape had changed tremendously and regulatory checks have increased. “The economic and political image of many countries has been tainted because of issues like money laundering and terrorism financing,” he said, adding Pakistan had throughout been one of the most affected countries from these issues due to numerous reasons.
Moreover, FATF Secretariat Director National Rizwana Qazi presented a detailed briefing on working and objectives of the Secretariat and structure of the training course that was attended by officers from different departments.
