FATF meet to begin in Paris today; outcome to decide Pak's fate on terror listing

The crucial meet of the Financial action task force(FATF), the global anti-terror financing body will begin today in Paris which will decide if Pakistan will be put on the blacklist or removed from the greylist.

The week-long meet will finish next Friday. It is for the first time a full-fledged plenary meeting is taking place under the new Chinese presidency of Xiangmin Liu.

A five-member Pakistani team led by Hammad Azhar, the federal minister for economic affairs of the country has reached Paris for the meet.

In early 2019, the former President of FATF, Marshall Billingslea, had said that the country has to do "significant work to meet the obligations they themselves undertook" as part of there high-level commitments and the country is "lacks in almost every respect of action plan."

FATF is a technical body, whose main aim is to protect the international financial system and the 30-year-old body works on the consensus of member countries.

The meet takes place after the Asia Pacific Group (APG) of the FATF had released the mutual evaluation report of Pakistan taken up during the August meet in Australia in which the country had not done well.

The report had said that Islamabad hasn't taken sufficient action to implement sanctions under the United Nation Security Committee of 1267 on 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed and country "faces significant money laundering and terror financing risks".

Pakistan was put on greylist by the FATF last year and which caused a loss of $10 billion to the Pakistan economy annually.

A blacklist will have a further detrimental impact on a weak Pakistani economy as investors won't be keen to invest in a country that is prone to terror financing.