Pakistan's rating on FATF recommendations gets better.

ISLAMABAD -- The Asia Pacific Group (APG) on Money Laundering has improved Pakistan's rating on 21 of the 40 technical recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) against money laundering and terror financing, but retained it on 'Enhanced Follow-up' for sufficient outstanding requirements.

The second Follow-Up Report (FUR) on Mutual Evaluation of Pakistan released by the APG - a regional affiliate of the Paris-based FATF - also downgraded the country on one criteria. The report said Pakistan was re-rated to 'compliant' status on five counts and on 15 others to 'largely compliant' and on yet another count to 'partially compliant'.

Overall, Pakistan is now fully 'compliant' with seven recommendations and 'largely compliant' with 24 others. The country is 'partially compliant' with seven recommendations and 'non-compliant' with two out of total 40 recommendations. All in all, Pakistan is now compliant or largely compliant with 31 out of 40 FATF recommendations.

The reporting date for this evaluation was October 1, 2020, which means Islamabad may have made further progress since then that would be evaluated at a later stage.

'Pakistan will move from enhanced (expedited) to enhanced follow-up, and will continue to report back to the APG on progress to strengthen its implementation of anti-money laundering and combating financing terror (AML/CFT) measures,' the APG said.

Pakistan submitted its third progress report in February 2021 and is yet to be evaluated.

Islamabad now compliant or largely compliant with 31 out of 40 recommendations

'Overall, Pakistan has made notable progress in addressing the technical compliance deficiencies identified in its Mutual Evaluation Report (MER) and has been re-rated on 22 recommendations,' the APG added.

It said recommendations 14, 19, 20, 21 and 27 had been re-rated to compliant. These pertain to money or value transfer services, higher risk countries, reporting of suspicious transactions, tipping-off and confidentiality and powers of supervisors.

The APG said Pakistan was re-rated to largely compliant with 15 recommendations - 1, 6, 7, 8, 12, 17, 22, 23, 24, 25, 30, 31, 32, 35 and 40. These include assessing risk and adopting risk-based approach, targeted financial sanctions relating to terror and terror financing, targeted financial sanctions related to proliferation, non-profit organisation, politically exposed persons and reliance on third parties.

Also, re-rating was done on designated...