For another four months, i.e. till February 2021, the financial action task force (FATF) has decided to keep Pakistan in the “grey-list” after seeing Pakistan’ successful compilation with 21 from 27 points of action.
After the three day plenary session ended today, this decision was announced by the President of FATF, Marcus Pleyer during a virtual press conference.
The official statement read: To date, Pakistan has made progress across all action plan items and has now largely addressed 21 of the 27 action items. As all action plan deadlines have expired, the FATF strongly urges Pakistan to swiftly complete its full action plan by February 2021.”
There are some strategic deficiencies that Pakistan need to work on and address in the meantime.
After the official statement, minister of industries, Hammad Azhar tweeted about Pakistan’s impressive achievement stating: “Pak has achieved impressive progress on its FATF action plan. 21 out of 27 action items now stand cleared. Remaining 6 rated as partially complete. Within a year, we progressed from 5/27 to 21/27 completed items. FATF acknowledged that any blacklisting is off the table now.’
The countries on grey-list are basically being monitored by FATF and Pakistan has been enlisted in the grey-list since, 2018. Due to the global pandemic, this FATF plenary was postponed which was initially supposed to happen in June 2020.
