New Delhi: The Global terror financing watchdog retained Pakistan on the ‘grey list’, giving it another four months to remove the deficiencies in three remaining points of the ‘action plan’.

Since June 2018, Pakistan has been on the list of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)’s “Jurisdictions under Increased Monitoring”, known colloquially as the ‘grey list’. Countries in this list have to complete an “Action Plan” within a stipulated time to get out of this list.

After the FATF plenary ended on Thursday, the watchdog announced that Pakistan has made “significant progress” on the entire action. “To date, Pakistan has made progress across all action plan items and has now largely addressed 24 of the 27 action items. As all action plan deadlines have expired, the FATF strongly urges Pakistan to swiftly complete its full action plan before June 2021”.

At a post-plenary virtual media briefing, FATF president, Marcus Pleyer stated that while progress has been made by Pakistan, there were still “some serious deficiencies”.

The remaining three areas in the Action Plan that Pakistan has to complete are related to terror financing. These are:

1. demonstrating that Terror Finance investigations and prosecutions target persons and entities acting on behalf or at the direction of the designated persons or entities;
2. demonstrating that Terror Finance prosecutions result in effective, proportionate and dissuasive sanctions; and
3. demonstrating effective implementation of targeted financial sanctions against all 1267 and 1373 designated terrorists, specifically those acting for or on their behalf.

“As soon as Pakistan shows it has completed these items, FATF will verify and members of FATF will vote,” stated Pleyer.

To a question on whether Pakistan could be ‘blacklisted’, he replied that Pakistan had shown a lot of progress on implementing the action plan, “that is not the time to put a country on the blacklist”.

Pakistan’s minister for industries and production, Hammad Azhar said that the country remained committed to complying with both the FATF evaluation processes.

At the last plenary in October 2020, FATF had announced that Pakistan had made progress in 21 out of the 27 action items and urged full implementation by February 2021.

FATF included four more countries to the ‘grey list’ at the latest plenary – Burkina Faso, the Cayman Islands, Morocco and Senegal. Besides, Iran and North Korea continued to remain on the ‘blacklist’.

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