Daily Times

Minister for Industries and Production Hammad Azhar on Saturday termed Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) decision to keep Pakistan on grey list a “diplomatic victory” for the country.

“FATF has acknowledged our high-level political commitment and significant progress. Yesterday’s consensus decision without any voting is our diplomatic victory. Thus, no voting criteria (for any voting numbers) was applied,” Hammad Azhar wrote on his official Twitter handle on Saturday.

He said that some circles were propagating “false and baseless information” about abstention or negative voting in the meeting.

“Some countries mentioned in the fake news are not even members of FATF. Pakistan enjoys broad international support and cooperation on FATF,” he said in another tweet.

On Friday, FATF gave yet another lifeline to Pakistan and decided to retain the country in its grey list for four more months while acknowledging political commitment to end deficiencies in the country’s terror financing regime.

Pakistan has again avoided being placed on the global dirty money watchdog’s blacklist, although it could not fully implement its 27-point action plan till June 2020 deadline. But the country made significant progress on 21 points of the plan.

“The FATF takes note of the significant progress made on a number of action plan items and to date, Pakistan has made progress across all action plan items and has now largely addressed 21 of the 27 action items,” according to a statement issued by the FATF Plenary on Friday.

But it said that “as all action plan deadlines have expired, the FATF strongly urges Pakistan to swiftly complete its full action plan by February 2021”.

In June 2018, Pakistan had been listed among the 16 jurisdictions under increased monitoring due to strategic deficiencies in their anti-money laundering (AML) and combating financing of terrorism (CFT) framework.

In February this year, the FATF plenary had warned that “all deadlines in the action plan have expired and should significant and sustainable progress, especially in prosecuting and penalising terror financing, not be made by the next plenary, the FATF will take action, which could include the FATF calling on its members and urging all jurisdictions to advise their investors to give special attention to business relations and transactions with Pakistan.