Panama, Angola and Algeria removed from FATF grey list
The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has removed Panama, Angola and Algeria from its “grey list”, consisting of countries it regards as having inadequate provisions in place to combating money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
In a statement, the international body said the three countries had each made “significant progress” in complying with FATF’s Anti-Money Laundering/Combating the Financing of Terrorism (AML/CMT) standards.
FATF said all three of the countries had “established the legal and regulatory framework to meet its commitments in its action plan regarding the strategic deficiencies that the FATF had identified in October 2011”, adding that they were “therefore no longer subject to the FATF’s monitoring process under its on-going global AML/CFT compliance process”.
There are now 13 jurisdictions that FATF regards as still having “strategic deficiencies” with respect to their AML/CFT combating provisions. They are Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (aka North Korea), Guyana, Iraq, Iran, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Papua New Guinea, Syria, Uganda, Vanuatu and Yemen.
FATF said that 11 of these countries have made “a high-level political commitment to work with the FATF”, but as yet none had sufficiently met its standards.
Two blacklisted countries – Iran and North Korea – have been identified as “high-risk and non-cooperative jurisdictions” and FATF has called on countries “to apply counter-measures”.
FATF said many jurisdictions have yet to be reviewed, meaning more countries are likely to appear on the grey list.
Based in Paris, FATF is an intergovernmental organisation which was founded in 1989,under the auspices of the G7, to come up with ways of tackling money-laundering. Its remit was later expanded to target terrorism financing.
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