The APG report, known as first ‘Follow-Up Report on Mutual Evaluation of Pakistan’, concluded that Pakistan’s progress on the 40 FATF recommendations on the effectiveness of anti-money laundering and combating financing terror system largely remained unchanged from a year before.
Pakistan has failed a peer review at the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global financial watch dog, that examines ways to plug the funds to terrorist groups among other things, despite Islamabad pushing through three laws last month to buttress its claims to be combating terrorism.
A “follow up report” by the Asia Pacific Group (APG) of the FATF to an assessment done last year that was made public on Monday, concluded that Pakistan has “made some progress in addressing the technical compliance deficiencies identified in its MER (Mutual Evaluation Report).”
But “Pakistan will remain in enhanced (expedited) follow-up, and will continue to report back to the APG on progress to strengthen its implementation of AML/CFT ( anti-money laundering/combating financing of terrorism) measures,” the report concluded.
The 41-member APG in August last year had downgraded Pakistan’s status to the “Enhanced Follow-up” category from “Regular Follow-up” over technical deficiencies to meet normal international financial standards. “Enhanced follow-up” is an intensive process of correction that deals with members with significant deficiencies (for technical compliance or effectiveness) in their AML/CFT systems.
