Indo-US dictation thru FATF makes Pakistan change view on 8 banned outfits

In what appeared to address the concerns expressed by India and US through Financial Action Task Force, Pakistan government has decided to upgrade a group of proscribed organisations to ‘high risk’ and start monitoring and re-examining their activities and profiles under heightened security checks at all layers of legal, administrative, investigative and financial regimes to comply with FATF requirement.

The global watchdog FATF is of the view that Pakistan did “not demonstrate a proper understanding of the terror financing risks posed by Daesh, AQ (Al Qaeda), Jud (Jamaatud Dawa), FIF (Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation), LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba), JeM (Jaish-e-Mohammad), HQN (Haqqani network), and persons affiliated with the Taliban”. The Paris-based FATF against financial crimes had expressed dissatisfaction over considering these entities as low to medium risk.
Therefore, Pakistan now declare all of them as high-risk entities and would be subject to greater scrutiny by all agencies and institutions of the state, starting from their registration to operations and from their fund collection to bank accounts and issuance of suspicious transactions, information sharing and so on, explained an official. He said these decisions were taken at a meeting of the general council on FATF led by Finance Secretary Arif Ahmed Khan as part of a series of meetings to comply with the FATF obligations.
Proscribed organisations will be subject to greater scrutiny by state agencies and institutions
Mr Khan had led the Pakistani delegation to Paris during the Feb 18-22 meetings of the FATF plenary and its group reviews. During the course of these meetings, Pakistan had banned the FIF and JuD on Feb 21.
The official said that based on revised risk profile to high from medium, all the institutions, including the Federal Investigation Agency, Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan, State Bank of Pakistan, National Counter-Terrorism Authority, Financial Monitoring Unit and relevant intelligence agencies, would separately review records, databanks and procedures and methodologies regarding the proscribed entities and their representatives.
Based on this review exercise and re-evaluation of risk indicators, fresh suspected transaction reports would originate and run through the banking sector, while law enforcement agencies would continue their ongoing tough actions against the banned entities, including confiscation of their assets and accounts.
All these institutions would complete this exercise within two weeks so as to present a compliance report to a delegation of the Asia-Pacific Joint Group — a regional associate of the FATF — due to visit Islamabad on March 24. The delegation would review Pakistan’s performance on the basis of Islamabad’s fresh exercise over the next two days (March 25-26) and submit its assessment report to the FATF headquarters.
The FATF would make a fresh review of Pakistan’s current progress and compliance with the remaining targets by May and conclude in its June review meetings whether the country should be moved out of the ‘grey list’ or kept in this list in case of minor shortcomings or be downgraded to the ‘black list’ having serious financial and economic repercussions in case of serious shortcomings.