AGP Disappoints.

Once again, the Asia-Pacific Group (APG) has disappointed Pakistan when it comes to fairly assessing the country's efforts in combatting money laundering and terrorism financing. Despite the near-unanimous global appreciation of how ardently Pakistan has worked to comply with the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) goals, the AGP has once again judged Pakistan too harshly and out of context; rating Pakistan's level of effectiveness as low as 10 out of 11 international goals on anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terror (AML/CFT).

The rating is not fair or accurate, considering the FATF itself has acknowledged Pakistan's progress. The task force had found Pakistan compliant or largely compliant on all the 34 points in February this year and had decided to field an onsite mission to verify it on the ground before formally announcing the country's exit from the grey list. It cannot be denied that Pakistan has taken a wide range of steps to comply with FATF, including introducing amendments in the Mutual Legal Assistance Act, 2020, AML/CFT, transparency of beneficial ownership information and implementation of targeted financial sanctions for proliferation finance by DNFBPs...