Thailand on money-laundering blacklistThe Nation
PARIS: -- The Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering (FATF), an international money-laundering watchdog, on Thursday added Thailand, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ghana and Tanzaniato its blacklist of nations that fail to meet international standards.
According to
www.wisegeek.com, being on this list can have serious consequences, as financial transactions originating in or traveling to those countries are subject to more intense scrutiny and can make it difficult to do business internationally for those governments and their citizens.
Founded in 1989 on the initiative of the Group of 7 (G7), the FATF aims to develop policies to combat money laundering and terrorism financing. The FATF Secretariat is housed at the headquarters of the OECD in Paris.
The body can make recommendations to any of the 36 countries that have signed a membership charter, as well as other nations, but it has no power to carry out sanctions.
A Reuters report on Feb 17 quotes executive secretary, Rick McDonell, told journalists, as saying that FATF has found that those five countries were flaunting recommendations made to them toward fighting money-laundering and financing terrorism.
In this round, no countries were taken off the blacklist, but Honduras and Paraguay were removed from an intermediary "gray-list" of countries found to be falling behind on international standards despite having committed to them.
"We are looking exclusively at the implementation of the standards," McDonell told journalists at a FATF meeting in Paris. "Countries that we look at wind up on the list because they have not implemented them."
The FATF blacklist now includes 17 countries. Aside from the five new ones, they are: Bolivia, Cuba, Ethiopia, Iran, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, North Korea, Sao Tome and Principe, Sri Lanka, Syria and Turkey.
The gray-list includes 22 countries: Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Morocco, Namibia, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Sudan, Tajikistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Yemen and Zimbabwe.
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