Testing time for Pakistan as FATF meets to scrutinise compliance report

NEW DELHI: The crucial meet of the Financial action task force or FATF, the global anti-terror financing body will begin on Sunday in Paris which will decide if Pakistan will be put on the blacklist or removed from the greylist.

FATF in a release said, "Progress by Iran, Pakistan and other countries that present a risk to the financial system". The week-long meet will finish on Friday (Septembr 18) and this is for the first time the full-fledged plenary meeting is taking place under the new Chinese presidency of Xiangmin Liu.

A five-member Pakistani team led by Hammad Azhar the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs of the country has reached Paris for the meet. In early 2019, the former President of FATF Marshall Billingslea had said that the country has to do "significant work to meet the obligations they themselves undertook" as part of there high-level commitments and the country is "lacking in almost every respect of action plan."

FATF is a technical body, whose main aim is to protect the international financial system and the 30-year-old body works on the consensus of member countries. The meet happens days before the Asia pacific group (APG) of the Financial Action Task Force had released the mutual evaluation report of Pakistan taken up during the August meet in Australia in which the country had not done well. 

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The report had even said that Islamabad hasn't taken sufficient action to implement sanctions under the United Nation Security Committee of 1267 on 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed and country "faces significant money laundering and terror financing risks"

Pakistan was put on greylist by the FATF last year and is causing a loss of $10 billion to Pakistani economy annually. A blacklist will further have a detrimental impact on a weak Pakistani economy as investors won't be keen to invest in a country that is prone to terror financing.