New FATF twists on AML jurisdiction risk

Richard Parlour, Financial Markets Law International, UK.

A few years ago the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global standard-setting body for money laundering and terrorist financing, attempted to encourage countries to take action against money laundering by introducing a procedure blacklisting those jurisdictions which the FATF felt did not implement their recommendations properly. This procedure caused a lot of angst and was fraught with political difficulty, eventually coming to an end when the last blacklisted country was removed from the list in 2006. Last year, however, the FATF worked on a number of new lists, targeting those it feels are lagging behind in implementing FATF recommendations. This article focuses on the latest lists issued on 16 February 2012.