Pakistan flunked 32 of 40 parameters at FATF review, China is its best chance

The FATF’s Asia Pacific group that met over two days in Australia’s capital Canberra to review the progress found that Pakistan was non-compliant on 32 of the 40 compliance parameters.

Updated on: Jun 20, 2020, 06:25:44 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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Pakistan has been moved to a list that entails close monitoring by the global terror financing watchdog FATF after Islamabad was found to have failed to deliver on most compliance parameters set for it.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan (PTI file photo)

The FATF’s Asia Pacific group that met over two days in Australia’s capital Canberra to review the progress found that Pakistan was non-compliant on 32 of the 40 compliance parameters. On 11 parameters, Pakistan was adjudged as low on 10.

“The Asia Pacific group decided to place Pakistan in the Enhanced Expedited Follow Up List for failure to meet its standards,” said a senior government official familiar with the developments.

The setback for Pakistan comes ahead of the Financial Action Task Force, or FATF’s plenary in October.

At this meeting, the global watchdog is to decide if Pakistan should continue in the grey list or be downgraded to the black list’ that entail harsher financial sanctions. Pakistan had been given time till October to improve its counter-terror finance operations or face further action.

Watch | FATF Asia Pacific group puts Pak on notice: Implications ahead

Government officials suggest that New Delhi wants the action that FATF takes to be commensurate to Pakistan’s success or failure to deliver on the 27-point action plan that the global watchdog had set for it.

But there has been recognition in New Delhi that the chance of Pakistan being downgraded to the blacklist at the plenary are remote after China took over FATF’s presidency. A top official at China’s central bank, People’s Bank of China Xiangmin Liu had taken over as FATF president on July 1 from Marshal Billingslea of the US

India has, however, been engaging with other FATF members to hold Pakistan accountable on terrorism, money laundering and terror financing. For now, India’s assessment is that Islamabad is still tiptoeing around the basic problem of terrorist support and trying to impress the international community and groups such as FATF with cosmetic steps.

Like the cases registered against numerous leaders and activists of terror groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Jamat-ud-Dawah (JuD), Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF) and Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FiF). But most of the arrests were made under a provision that does not let the authorities hold a suspect beyond 60 days. Pakistan has repeatedly detained JeM founder Masood Azhar and LeT founder Hafiz Saeed mostly under laws that provide for detention for apprehension of breach of peace.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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