Govt decides to ban movement of proscribed outfits

ISLAMABAD: The mission of Asia Pacific Group (APG), a regional body of Financial Action Task Force (FATF), is scheduled to visit Pakistan by end of the ongoing month for undertaking mutual evaluation on the basis of which the FATF will gauge Islamabad’s progress in coming May/June on implementation measures against terror financing and money laundering.

In a major decision, the PTI government has decided in principle to release all required funding to the administrators who will take control of religious seminaries and other welfare services run by any proscribed entities such as Falah-e-Insaniat (FeI) or Jaish-e-Mohammad (MeM) or any other banned entities in any part of the country and their movement will be banned.

The APG mission will tentatively be visiting Pakistan from March 25 to 28, 2019. Some sources say that they might reach Islamabad for mutual evaluation from March 22 to 28 of this month. “It was almost a year back when the Ministry ofFinance did not release the required funding after taking control of some madarassas but now the government took principled decision to release all funds when the bills would be submitted from the government appointed administrators of any such entity,” a top official of PTI-led government told The News here Monday. Until now, no bill has been submitted by any administrator, but the decision has been taken at the PM level that after submission of funding bill, the Ministry of Finance will release the funds without any delay from now onwards.

The FATF review is expected to be done in June 2019 probably at Colombo which will be quite crucial for Pakistan as the last review held at Paris in last month provided smooth sailing but now Islamabad would have to demonstrate its action on account of curbing terror financing to exclude itself from grey and move into white list. If Pakistan was moved into blacklist or kept into grey list with more action plan it would not be good omen for the struggling economy of Pakistan. However, Pakistani authorities are confident that the country possesses all kind of enforcement powers to demonstrate its skills for moving ahead towards the desired objectives.

Another official said the APG mission was tentatively supposed to visit Pakistan this month for undertaking mutual evaluation exercise that had kick-started from October 2018 to assess Pakistan’s compliance on FATF standards and its effectiveness.

This correspondent sent out email message to FATF headquarters in Paris and inquired whether the FATF could take decision to put Pak into blacklist or put it into grey list for another year in coming June, or will it take decision after September 2019 review, the written reply stated that at its June plenary meeting, the FATF will discuss and update the two public documents identifying jurisdictions that may pose a risk to the international financial system. The decision to publicly identify a jurisdiction, or remove a jurisdiction from its public documents, lies with the FATF plenary, the statement added.

Pakistan’s official sources said that Prime Minister Imran Khan had chaired high-level meeting last week to review progress on Anti-Money Laundering (AML) related matters. The DG Financial Monitoring Unit (FMU) while briefing the meeting stated that as a result of consistent efforts and deployment of robust transaction monitoring systems as well as strengthening of compliance functions, the reporting flow of suspicious transactions reports (STRs) significantly went up in the year 2018 from 5,548 STRs in 2017 to 8,707 STRs.

Further, based on results for February, 2019 it is expected that reporting of STRs shall rise further. In order to address the significant rise in the inflow of STRs, FMU has enhanced its analytical capabilities and is effectively using GoAML technology platform to reduce the turnaround time, in converting STRs into actionable financial intelligence reports and to ensure that only those financial intelligence reports are forwarded to the law enforcing agencies (LEAs) that carry reasonably high risk score.

The risk assessment model used by FMU for sharing quality and actionable financial intelligence with the LEAs has allowed FMU to meet its core strategic objective in a timely manner. As the number of STRs and the resultant financial intelligence shared with the LEAs is increasing, it is expected that these financial intelligence reports shall allow the LEAs to translate them into successful prosecutions, convictions and recoveries.

In only January 2019, 982 STRs were processed but only 55 financial intelligence reports were disseminated to Financial Investigation Agency (FIA) and Inland Revenue (FBT-IR). Further, in order to enhance the domestic coordination with LEAs and other AML/CFT stakeholders, the FMU has already established its liaison office in Islamabad.

“With reference to enhanced international cooperation, FMU is into discussions with various key countries to develop relationships for formal exchange of financial intelligence,” said the official. This information exchange benefits not only the operational work of the FMU, but also law enforcement agencies in tracking the international movements of the proceeds of crime, concluded the officials.