KARACHI: Asia Pacific Group (APG) of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on money laundering has released its mutual evaluation report on October 02, 2019, where the group has discussed measures in place in Pakistan during onsite visit conducted in October 2018.
Analysts at Topline Research said that according to recently released report by APG, out of 40 recommendations given to Pakistan, the country has shown compliance to one factor ‘Financial Institutions Secrecy Law’ and has shown non-compliance in four areas.
However, Pakistan is partially compliant on 26 and largely compliant on 9 recommendations.
The analysts believe the probability is high that Pakistan will remain on the “grey list” as the government needs minimum of 3 votes to avoid falling in black list. Support from China, Malaysia and Turkey for the said matter is likely.
International Monetary fund (IMF) has also kept FATF issue as a structural benchmark with timeline ending Oct 2019, whereby Pakistan’s AML/CFT was supposed to be strengthened.
In case of black-list the potential impact would be overall downgrade of the financial system of Pakistan and restrictions on its markets.
