Saudi Arabia backstabbing Pakistan at FATF?

Foreign Office (FO) spokesperson Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri has rejected “false media reports” regarding Saudi Arabia’s role in the assessment of Pakistan’s Financial Action Task Force (FATF) action plan.

According to a press release, FO categorically rejected the story circulating on a segment of the media as false and baseless.

Earlier in the day, Azhar Mashwani, Punjab chief minister’s focal person for digital media, tweeted that reports of Saudi Arabia voting against Pakistan at FATF were fake and that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs would issue a statement on this.

⚠️🚫 FAKE NEWS 🚫⚠️

Reportedly, Ministry of Foreign Affairs will issue statement on this Fake News. pic.twitter.com/8PcZCr8HaQ

— Azhar Mashwani (@MashwaniAzhar) October 22, 2020

“Pakistan and Saudi Arabia enjoy strong fraternal ties and the two countries have always cooperated with each other on all matters of bilateral, regional and international importance,” said the statement by the FO spokesperson.

“Pakistan greatly values its relations with the brotherly Saudi Arabia and firmly rejects such malicious propaganda.”

The statements come after renowned journalist, Sabir Shakir, claimed that Saudi Arabia had voted against Pakistan in the virtual plenary of the FATF.

There are rumours on social media that Saudi Arabia is going to vote against Pakistan at the FATF. Their source is ARY's Sabir Shakir, who has claimed that not only a "friendly, brotherly" country had voted against Pakistan but it had asked Turkey to do so as well pic.twitter.com/qec7LElZtU

— Bilal Farooqi (@bilalfqi) October 22, 2020

He had asserted that Saudi Arabia lobbied to woo the support of other Muslim countries including Turkey to move Pakistan into the blacklist of the global financial watchdog.

FATF:

According to Dawn, a virtual meeting of the FATF, from October 21-23, will decide if Pakistan should be excluded from its ‘grey list’, based on a review of Islamabad’s performance to meet global commitments and standards on fight against money laundering and terror financing (ML&TF).

The FATF plenary was earlier scheduled in June but Islamabad got an unexpected breather after the global watchdog against financial crimes temporarily postponed all mutual evaluations and follow-up deadlines in the wake of grave health risk following COVID-19 pandemic. The Paris-based agency also put a general pause in the review process, thus giving additional four months to Pakistan to meet the requirements.

The plenary had formally placed Pakistan in the grey list in June 2018 due to “strategic deficiencies” in anti-money laundering/combating the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) after a push from India supported by the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK) and some European countries.

The FATF will examine if the country had demonstrated remedial actions and sanctions applied in cases of AML/CFT violations, relating to terrorist financing (TF) risk management and TFS (terror financing sanctions) obligations.

The FATF will also judge if competent authorities were cooperating and taking action to identify and taking enforcement action against illegal money or value transfer services (MVTS) and had proven implementation of cross-border currency and bearer negotiable instruments (BNI) controls at all ports of entry, including applying effective, proportionate and dissuasive sanctions.