Pak to remain in FATF's grey list, gets time till Feb 2020 to act against terror groups

 Pakistan will remain on the Financial Action Task Force's (FATF) grey list till February 2020 and has been asked to fulfill its commitments by that time period. Most members expressed serious concern about Pakistan's progress on its anti finance terror commitments.

The outcome comes after a week-long meet of the FATF's plenary in Paris which started on Monday. A 5 member Pakistani team led by Hammad Azhar, the Federal Minister for Economic Affairs of the country, is in Paris for the meet.

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.

Pakistan was put on greylist by the FATF last year and is causing a loss of $10 billion to Pakistan's economy annually. A blacklist will further have a detrimental impact on a weak Pakistani economy as investors won't be keen to invest in a country that is prone to terror financing.

Earlier this month, the Asia pacific group (APG) of the Financial Action Task Force 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 even stated that Islamabad hasn't taken sufficient action to implement sanctions under the  United Nations Security Council resolution 1267 on 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed. The report also stated that the country also "faces significant money laundering and terror financing risks."